The Early Stories (90 page)

One Thursday after work I got out of the car and there he was, a little red-brown bird with absurdly long tail feathers and a dictatorial way of cocking his head. He was smaller than the hens, but already they followed him liquidly, bubbling in their throats and jostling for precedence, as he surveyed the pen and coop I had built, all unbeknownst for
him
. He had been brought in a psychedelic Volkswagen bus by a small bearded man with pink eyes and a mussed, unhappy air. Joy, Eileen, and Katharine
were sitting with him at the kitchen table in the evening light. Strange thing, both Joy and Eileen had cigarettes in their hands. Eileen had quit when my mother's cancer was diagnosed, and as far as I knew Joy had never started. The rooster-bringer had heard of our need from a boyfriend of Joy's ecology instructor at school. Before I arrived, and though he mumbled, they had drawn a surprising mass of information from him: he was nearly thirty, his wife had left him a while ago, the “bunch of people” he was living with on this farm was breaking up, they were giving everything away—roosters, sheep, the Rototiller. Also, he had a cold, and couldn't find a satisfactory kind of industrial glue for his harpsichords. Soon after I arrived, he left.

“God, Dad, he was bogus,” Mark said.

“I agree.”

“I thought he was
cute
,” Joy called from the other room. This was new; she never eavesdropped. What other people said or did, her stance had been these past years, did not touch her. She had lived in a world of her own making, with a serenity that floated dishes onto the table without a click.

Now, with a crash, her dependence on others, and ours on her, was declared. She begged or stole the Ford so often we have had to buy a second car, just as the gas shortage overtakes the world. Eileen is back to doing the dishes and smoking a pack a day. Katharine says that if Joy could have chickens she doesn't see why she can't have some sheep in the back yard. They would keep the grass short for me. Their wool would be worth money. They would look pretty. Mark has offered to shoot the chickens with his new .22. Ethan, his first partner fled, now goes to dances at the junior high, one of my neckties knotted loose, his hair combed without our nagging; he is so dolled up and beautiful we all have to laugh at him before he goes. As to Joy's departure, it was hurried and at the time not very real to the rest of us. I retain no glimpses. What coat was she wearing? What suitcase did she take? Did she slam the door? She may have said “Much obliged,” but I didn't hear it.

The house seems bigger. The record-player, after its spell of Ralph Kirkpatrick, is back to Carole King, or silent. The front hall is clear to traffic. We come and go. Sometimes days pass before one of us remembers to bring in the eggs. Irregularly fed, the flock has pecked a gap beneath the chicken wire, and gets into the neighbor's lettuce. During one such outing, another neighbor's Labrador carried off the white hen with a toe missing—the lowest in the pecking order, uncannily. How did the dog
know? He carried her in his mouth, white as fresh laundry in the dusk, up into the pines; the children heard her squawk and throbble until night fell.

If all is not well with his world, the rooster never admits it. Every morning, he gets up on those Ruberoid self-sealing Slate Green asphalt shingles I hammered down to make him a roof, a midair hop and skip from my bedroom window, and he crows. Lying awake, I can hear him practicing his crow in the small hours, inside his house: a rather gentle, even wheezy, half-unfurling of the magic scroll inside his chest. Maybe he is dreaming of the dawn, maybe the streetlight fools him. But there is no mistaking the real thing: as the windowpanes brighten from purple to mauve to white, he flaps up on his roof with a slap like a newspaper hitting the porch and gives a crow as if to hoist with his own pure lungs that sleepy fat sun to the zenith of the sky. He never moderates his joy, though I am gradually growing deafer to it. That must be the difference between soulless creatures and human beings: creatures find every dawn as remarkable as all the ones previous, whereas the soul grows calluses.

Solitaire
 

The children were asleep, and his wife had gone out to a meeting; she was like his father in caring about the community. He found the deck of cards in the back of a desk drawer and sat down at the low round table. He had reached a juncture in his life where there was nothing to do but play solitaire. It was the perfect, final retreat—beyond solitaire, he imagined, there was madness. Only solitaire utterly eased the mind; only solitaire created that blankness into which a saving decision might flow. Conviviality demanded other people, with their fretful emanations of desire; reading imposed the author's company; and one emerged from the anesthetic of drunkenness to find that the operation had not been performed. But in the rise and collapse of the alternately colored ranks of cards, in the grateful transpositions and orderly revelations and unexpected redemptions, the circuits of the mind found an occupation exactly congruent with their own secret structure. The mind was filled without being strained. The week after he graduated from college—already married, his brain worn to the point where a page of newspaper seemed a cruelly ramifying puzzle—he played solitaire night after night by the glow of a kerosene lamp on an old kitchen table in Vermont; and at the end of the week he had seen the way that his life must go in the appallingly wide world that had opened before him. He had drawn a straight line from that night to the night of his death, and began walking on it.

During that week he had remembered how in his childhood his mother would play solitaire by the light of the stained-glass chandelier in the dining room. His father would be out somewhere, doing good for the community, and he and his mother would be alone. He was an only child, and as such obscurely felt himself to be the center of the sadness that oppressed them. Frightened of her silence and of the slithering of the
cards, he would beg her to stop. Tell me a story, come into the kitchen and make some toast, go to bed, anything; but stop playing solitaire.

“One more game,” his mother would say, her faced pitted and dragged by the shadows cast by the overhead chandelier. And then she would slip into one of the impersonations whereby she filled their empty house with phantoms, as if to make up to him for the brothers and sisters she had not, somehow, been permitted to give him. “The weary gambler stakes his all,” she said in a soft but heavy monotone. “The night is late. The crowds have left the gaming tables. One lonely figure remains, his house, his car, his yacht, his jewels, his very life hinging on the last turn of the cards.”

“Don't, Mother;
don't!
” He burst into tears, and she looked up and smiled, as if greeting a fond forgotten sight upon her return from a long journey. He felt her wonder,
Who is this child?
It was as if the roof of the house were torn off, displaying the depth of night sky.

He knew now that her mind had been burdened in that period. Everything was being weighed in it. He remembered very faintly—for he had tried to erase it immediately—her asking him if he would like to go alone with her far away, to the sunny Southwest, and live a new life.
No
, must have been his answer,
Mother, don't!
For he had loved his father, loved him out of the silence and blindness that wait at the bottom of our brains as the final possibility, the second baptism; the removal of his father plunged him toward that black pool prematurely. And she, too, must have felt a lack of ripeness, for in the end she merely moved them all a little distance, to a farm where he grew up in solitude and which at the first opportunity he left, a farm where now his father and mother still performed, with an intimate expertness that almost justified them, the halfcomic routines of their incompatibility. In the shrill strength of his childish fear he had forced this on them; he was, in this sense, their guardian, their father.

And now the father of others. Odd, he thought, setting a black nine below a red ten, how thoroughly our lives are devoted to doing the contrary of what our parents did. He had married early, to escape the farm, and had rapidly given his wife children, to make his escape irrevocable. Also, he had wished to spare his children the responsibility and terror of solitude. He wondered if they loved him as he had loved his father, wondered what depth of night sky would be displayed to them by his removal. To some extent he was already removed. They formed a club from which he was excluded. Their corporate commotion denied him access. The traces of his own face in their faces troubled him with the suspicion that
he had squandered his identity. Slowly he had come to see that children are not our creations but our guests, people who enter the world by our invitation but with their smiles and dispositions already prepared in some mysterious other room. Their predictable woe and fright and the crippled shapes they might take had imperceptibly joined the finances and the legalities as considerations that were finite, manageable. Problems to which there is any solution at all, no matter how difficult and complex, are not really problems.
(Red four on black five.)
Night by night, lying awake, he had digested the embarrassments, the displacements, the disappointments, the reprimands and lectures and appeals that were certain; one by one he had made impossibilities possible. At last he had stripped the problem to its two white poles, the two women.

His wife was fair, with pale eyelashes and hair containing, when freshly shampooed, reddish lights. His mistress was as black-and-white as a drawing in ink: her breasts always shocked him with their electric silken pallor, and the contrast with the dark nipples and aureoles. In the summer, she tanned; his wife freckled. His wife had the more delicate mind, but his mistress, having suffered more, knew more that he didn't know. Their opposition was not simple. His wife's handwriting, developed out of the printing she had been taught at a progressive school, looked regular but was often illegible; the other's, with its hurried stenographic slant, was always clear, even when phrasing panic. His wife, carnally entered, opened under him as an intimidating moist void; his mistress in contrast felt dry and tight, so tight the first thrusts quite hurt. His wife, now that she saw herself on the edge of an abyss, clung to him with an ardor that his mistress would have found immodest. He had come to feel a furtive relief when a day passed without lovemaking being thrust upon him; pinned between whirlpools, he was sated with the sound and sight of women crying. His mistress cried big: with thrilling swiftness her face dissolved and, her mouth smeared out of all shape, she lurched against him with an awkward bump and soaked his throat in abusive sobs. Whereas his wife wept like a miraculous icon, her face immobile while the tears ran, and so silently that as they lay together in bed at night he would have to ask her, “Are you crying?” Back and forth, back and forth, like a sore fist his heart oscillated between them, and the oscillations grew in intensity as the two poles drew together and demanded that he choose one. He had allowed them to draw together, had allowed his wife to know, and allowed his mistress to know that she knew, in the hope that they would merge—would turn out to be, in fact, one woman, with no choice needed, or the decision settled between them. He had miscalculated. Though he had
drawn them so close that one settling into his embrace could smell the other's perfume, each woman became more furiously herself.

(A king uncovered, but nowhere to put him.)
How could he balance their claims and rights? The list was entirely one-sided. Prudence, decency, pity—not light things—all belonged to the guardian of his children and home; and these he would lose. He would lose the homely old neighborhood that he loved, the summer evenings spent scratching in his little garden of lettuce and tomatoes, the gritty adhesion of his elder daughter's hand to his as they walked to the Popsicle store, the decade of books and prints and records and furniture that had accumulated, the cellar full of carpentry tools, the attic full of old magazines. And he would as well lose his own conception of himself, for to abandon his children and a woman who with scarcely a complaint or a quarrel had given him her youth was simply not what he would do. He was the son of parents who had stayed together for his sake. That straight line, once snapped, could not be set straight again.