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

Joan’s mother would dream of expressing that sentiment to Joan, though they managed to communicate it, to some extent. Indeed, he sometimes called her—with what might have been a faint touch of irony—his princess. But the irony was really just his shyness—or his caution. She looked like a princess, and she ruled like a princess, not that anyone minded. (Thirty years later her daughter, Mary, would be exactly the same, an absolute—fortunately benevolent—despot.) When they could afford it, they bought Joan presents, pretty dresses, toys, books, a long-haired, cinnamon-colored dog named Flopsy (run over by a trolley car the first month she had him), and above all what was, for them, an enormously expensive spinet piano, a Story & Clark. They paid for a succession of piano teachers, including, finally, Leo Serota, the best pianist in St. Louis at the time, formerly chief piano teacher at Tokyo University; they bought her a twenty-five-dollar violin, later a fifty-dollar cello; they drove her, or rather her father drove her, to symphony concerts, where her father would fall asleep—not, as Joan imagined, because he didn’t care for music, but because his day began at five, the music was soothing, the hall was dark, and he was an innocent, or at any rate innocent of false pride. He also took her, four times, to the opera—each time, by some fluke, the same opera, Boris Godunov—and innumerable times to what was then the glory of that wonderfully naive, ridiculous German city (as she would later remember it), the “Muny Opera,” where she saw (and later played in the orchestra for, after she’d become a violinist and cellist) The Red Mill, Desert Song, Springtime, The Student Prince, The Vagabond King, and An Evening with Gilbert and Sullivan. (Though she was still in her teens, she could have told them when they put on that Evening with Gilbert and Sullivan thing that the Muny was finished, an epoch had ended; put your money on KSDF.)

Those were, naturally, wonderful times. The whole family would go to the grandiose, pseudo-Greek open-air theater in Forest Park—Joan had now two younger brothers—and sometimes her favorite aunt and uncle would go too, or the cousins from New York State. They would sit under the stars, hoping it wouldn’t rain, or at any rate that was the hope all the grown-ups laid claim to if the smell in the air suggested doubt, though possibly they too took pleasure in seeing the huge set hurriedly rolled away, folded in on itself like a Chinese paper dollhouse, and the audience rushing out with programs held over their heads like housetops, and the huge old trees of the park bending, black against gray, and then the fierce Midwestern rain sweeping in, brightly lighted, like a theater curtain, and the low sky majestically booming, booming as if for joy.

Mostly, of course, it didn’t rain, and they sat listening to the music, swaying to the dancing (swaying inwardly, that is; they were inclined to be timid), eating hot dogs or ice cream from the people who came selling them up and down the aisles like the vendors at a circus or a Cardinals’ game. And then, very late (as she’d judged time then), her father would drive them home, going wonderfully fast, as he always did, the lights of the old houses flashing by like comets. Joan’s mother, at corners or intersections, would suck air between her teeth and sometimes whimper, “Oh Donald, please!” and he’d pretend, for a time, to drive more cautiously.

Joan’s mother was pretty and intelligent, the youngest daughter in a large German family even poorer than Joan’s father’s. The latter at least had a good-sized farm, an old, old place just off Sinks Road, Missouri, ten miles north of St. Louis, a fairly unprofitable farm at the time, cratered like the moon—except the craters were lush, filled with water, edged by trees—but a gold mine later: there was oil under those sinkholes, and huge caves where the Laclede Oil Company would buy rights to store natural gas; and besides, urban sprawl was hurrying north, so that in the fifties, lots overlooking the convergence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, of which the farm could offer several, would go for five thousand dollars an acre. One such lot, a large one, would be the site of Joan’s father’s large, modern house when he moved his family back home “to the country” from Ferguson. Joan could remember what it once had been like. When she was little the land was still heavily wooded, populated by wolves and cranes and her peculiar, black-bearded great-uncle Zack, who had a cabin with linoleum on the walls. Every spring he floated his mules across to the long, dark, vine-filled island and ploughed a little patch of it, where he grew horse corn and pumpkins and sweet potatoes. The place was infested with great fat rattlesnakes and copperheads. He’d sit on the porch and smoke his pipe and, he said, watch them play. She only saw him once or twice. He didn’t even come out of the woods to go to church. Thankfully, as all the family said, he was long gone—his cabin in ruins, letting in light like an old broken crate—when the bulldozers came. The landscape would change beyond all recognition, and tony people would move in, or flambuginous-tony. Possum Hollow, where her great-uncle Zack used to hunt, would become “Castlereigh Estates.”

Joan’s mother’s side was less fortunate, materially. They lived in a small house that—beneath the shingles on the outside and plaster on the inside—was a crooked old log cabin of a sort you might expect to find Negroes in. It went back to before the Civil War, but its antiquity gave it no particular charm. It was beautifully set, on a rise beside one of those rich, dense hollows one finds only in Missouri—a creek, huge old trees with crows in them, over by the fence a matched pair of mules—but the house itself was about as handsome