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

as ruled from outside as any character in a book.” That’s not true! she thought—and it came as a revelation: I’ve proved it’s not true in my life. Paul had read to her from his astrology book: “The Leo child is daring, unflinching, and unafraid.” She said: “Are you aware, Martin, that I am daring, unflinching, and unafraid?”

“I am indeed,” he said, and actually grinned, so that even Evan grinned and drew back, slightly embarrassed, out of his father’s arms.

She remembered—guiltily, for some reason—that Paul had read of the Pisces—Sarah Fenton—“The Pisces child is a mystic and self-sacrificing seeker of harmony.” Anger flashed up in her for an instant, and she thought, I can run circles around her mysticism and harmony, remembered: “The Leo is proud and jealous.” Abruptly, with pleasure, she laughed. She was proud. She liked herself, and the whole world loved her, and they had better keep it up or by God there was going to be hell to pay.

Though brilliant, Joan Orrick was not a woman who often had ideas. She had one now. Perhaps Martin was determined by outside forces, like a character in a novel—perhaps Cancers and Pisces and Virgos like Paul Brotsky, even Capricorns like Evan and Mary—were determined and, because they were determined, needed the subtle, medicinal influences of all Time and Space to heal them, save them. Leos were free. Even though she never did concerts anymore, the metaphor for her life was the concert stage. These people she loved—these beautiful blond children rushing toward adulthood, and even Martin Orrick, famous novelist—were not her equals, though she couldn’t move a finger without them: they were her audience. For you, my loves, she thought, I wear this golden dress, these diamonds and rubies, flashing them up and down awesome chromatic scales. For love of you I resurrect the dead of Vienna, also St. Louis dancers, black-bearded hermits, crazy-eyed old women, the bullet-ridden bodies of no-’count drunken Frenchmen. Sit up straight and listen, and God damn you if you cough! This is a love song you’re hearing! No praise will be too great, but there will be, please, no applause. A silence will be sufficient, such a hush as would give the frail mystical Pisces a heart attack.

Mary said, leaning toward her father, “Why is Mommy wearing that wicked grin?” (Wicked was one of the words she was using in her fiction lately.)

“Wicked?” Joan said. “Your gentle, sweet mother? Wicked?”

Nineteen

One night, toward the finish of one of his tours, he did a reading at Bennington College in Vermont. It was a cheapie, as she called it. For readings, these days, he got a thousand dollars a night. But Bennington supported young writers, and Martin had a messianic passion for backing promising beginners, now that he had clout. He had several young writers he wanted Bennington to invite up for readings from New York. She went with him, as usual, and it was the usual great success. He read the kind of thing he was famous for, poetic and dark, a tragic piece that made human existence seem senseless and useless and, by virtue of its very waste, or perhaps by virtue of its redemption through art, worth clinging to. She remembered some critic’s having written of him once—and it was truer now than ever—that “his characters move terror-stricken, adrift in a universe grown wholly unfamiliar.” She remembered the words because she’d wondered at the time why people were always so impressed by such things—why they thought him a great artist when he made everything seem sad and hopeless. Yet it was beautiful writing, there was no doubt of that, and not shapeless, self-regarding like, say, Mahler when he tried something heavier than a song. All the same, it was a view of the world that Joan Orrick did not share. How incredible, she thought, that intelligent people should find misery and pain, even at one remove, in fiction, so attractive!

It was a pleasant place for a reading—a small, comfortable hall in what had once been a barn, wooden floors worn smooth and shaped by generations of students, small-paned windows of a kind she’d found common in the east, the whole thing totally unpretentious, which was precisely why one felt here so real, so classy, so solidly connected with the past and therefore the present. The people gave her the same feeling—their clothes, the way they sat, the structure of their faces. They might have been sitting here, calmly listening—without intense Midwestern hunger or squinting fascination, without mulish reservation or timidity or gall—as long as the low, accommodating mountains of Vermont had been listening, as long as flat eastern voices like Martin’s had been speaking of life’s steady sorrows and hurrying joys.

He was reading in a black robe with a great, silver chain, as he often did lately. He was such an eccentric it looked natural on him, very handsome, in fact, his prematurely silver hair flowing down his back, his English-Irish-Welsh voice singing through language as the voices of his preacher teacher lawyer ancestors had done all those years, or centuries rather, calling in vain for heaven’s mercy. People wept, listening. She could have wept herself, but against the power of the story, against the “dark vision” his reviewers absurdly, perversely praised, her pleasure in his looks, his power to move strangers, triumphed. He was now distinctly fat. She liked him fat. And it struck her that, whatever his faults, he had never lost that childlike fairness: principles were evil, never people, in his fiction. He created no bad characters, and if he’d seemed not to love her, from time to time—the complaint was behind her—it was nevertheless true that all through the years, every heroine he’d put on paper was recognizably herself. All but one of them were red-heads. In fact in one of his novels—he was obviously unaware of it—all the characters were red-heads. It startled her to notice that just now, here in this roomful of “Bennington girls,” also talented