The Sunlight Dialogues (40 page)

He shook his head. “Mere truth. A butterfly’s wing.”

She slid out of bed then and went to the dresser for the cigarettes. She lit one for each of them.

“What started you on the magic tricks?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your father, I think.”

Hodge grinned, then nodded. “Started me on everything. He was—” He had hunted a moment for appropriate words, then let it go. “A forceful personality, as they say.”

“A casket for everything he loved.”

And that too was true, it had seemed to him, but he caught the truth lightly, half-evading it as he caught it, the way you catch a fast pitch that will break the bones of your hand if you take it straight on. “He was beautiful,” he said. “Which is nothing much, in a way, I guess. Not uncommon. But he was.”

Helene nodded. “I thank God my father was somewhat a klutz. He let me be.”

“You’re pretty,” he said. He was tempted to quote her Sappho; but that was for Kathleen. Now it seemed to him that it wasn’t true—was too easy—blaming their failure on the Congressman. Directly under her eyes he palmed the cigarette, made it reappear, palmed it, made it appear, and continued to do it, over and over, mechanical. He watched his painfully won skill dispassionately, with artist’s pleasure, as though he were not the magician but only the assistant, a dutiful instrument. “It was once commonly maintained that Beauty, Goodness, and Truth were subsistent entities,” he said. “That is, that they are properties which attach to existent particulars, but which might without absurdity be supposed to attach to nothing.” He saw the words cut into the wall in precise, ornamental calligraphs.

“Here we go,” she said. She smiled politely. It pleased her to be loved by a man who was clever, though she was not interested.

“I’m serious,” he said and saw it in italic. “As long as the world was solidly theistic, the absolutes were plausible; when it got fashionable to speak of the death of God, people began to talk as though Beauty, Goodness, and Truth were psychological effects—probably base ones. For instance, beauty is described as the sense of relief experienced by ‘living tissue’—that’s jargon for mind and soul—when it’s able to adjust present experience and remembered attitudes, in other words, is able to stop worrying. Some people didn’t believe this account …”

She was leaning on her elbow, watching the cigarette slowly appear and disappear in his hand, her lips drawn to a half-pout half-smile, eyebrows lowered with concentration; but she was thinking neither of what he was saying nor of what his magician’s hand was doing: remembering something out of her own life, or planning where she would eat tomorrow night, or making a list. Her breasts were like a young girl’s, firm and small, and they would rise surprisingly to his touch. He knew that by the simple flicking of a switch he could understand her, move into her experience if only for a moment: it was exactly what he was trying to tell her. He had seen such things, and it was not true that they had to be destructive. On the contrary, that was the greatest of heresies. His father, busy at his work, looked up from his desk, recognized him, smiled. Even if it was only for a moment, it was complete. Politics ceased to exist for him that moment; and as for the small boy in knickers—the casualty of Christmas past—the high, polished, formal room, the crossed flags behind the desk, the littered filing cabinets, the books—all came down to a homely familiarity, mere frame around the Congressman’s face. He had thought at first that he was special to his father, like Benjamin in the Bible, but it wasn’t so, he learned later. To the old man, all that stirred was special—the geese flying over the capitol building, for instance.

(Look! he’d said, and hunkered in solemn attire
to lift his son, like any God or farmer,
and pointed. Over the capitol dome, to the west,
a wing of one-and-many geese went sliding,

honking south like old Model T’s redeemed,
gone glorious. Oh, not for the lesson in it,
not for the high-falutin, falling mind
organizing itself to swim or fly

with ease searching out the dire vacuity:
not for that: for
thisness:
twenty-four geese
enroute from swamp to swamp, encountering a dome
at twilight, passing and touching an unseen mark;

they freeze, fall out of time and into thought,

an idiograph in the blood of man and son.

No image. The pure idea of holiness.

His mother said when they told of their vision, “Ah!”)

That was how it was. When they were together at supper—the big room bright, the table as loaded with his mother’s old china serving dishes as a table would be at the Grange Hall, the four brothers and their tanned, boyish sister contending busily, passionately for truth and mashed potatoes and applesauce—the old man, white hair streaming, saw them all, reached out with his heart and mind and knew them. He made them more themselves than they normally were, not in the sense that he forced them to some identity of his own choosing: he
looked
at them, guessed out what went unsaid and made them clearer to themselves and also surer. Not always. He too could be abstracted, sunk inward to his own considerations. His white hair lay like dirty cotton on the collar of his coal-black formal suit, his liver-spotted white hands lay on his belly like the hands of a man in his coffin, his chin protruded like a snowplow blade, and his eyes grew calm as stones in the bed of a stream. For hours he wouldn’t move a finger, wouldn’t even sniff. After such spells he was a hurricane of energy and joy. A manipulator, an orator, a writer of bills and crafty epigrams. They had not minded his periods of remoteness. One intense moment is longer than a thousand years. And the moments when his concern for them turned on were dependably frequent. He became a knower of gestures, a pure imagination. He knew a man’s character by becoming it, like the flagae who lurk in the mirrors of the Hindu. When strangers came to the house he would sit tense with concentration in his chair, huge old gentle hippopotamus with shaggy brows, tie askew, and before the talk was over he would know the man and would know, besides, the road to the man’s conversion. Not that he sat in judgment, ticking off rights and wrongs. There was nothing in him of righteousness, hard doctrine. To think that a man’s opinions were wrong was for him no more to think less of the man than to think that a tree planted in the wrong place was wicked and pernicious. He was impatient with men who refused to stop speaking platitudes, but it was against his faith in life to suppose such stubbornness proved stupidity. He was a work of art, and living with him was like living in the presence of art. The absolutes of human intuition took on the weight and form of reality. The Good became, in his presence, an aquastor, an ethereal form made as visible and tangible as an angel standing on a stone. It was impossible to say afterward, “There are no angels.” At worst one must say—Taggert Hodge must say—
Dear God, where are the angels?

And so (he remembered, floating in the dark), knowing he could reach out with a simple question and know her, be translated in an instant to the beach in her mind, or the list she was making, or the fear she was toying with, and knowing, on the other hand, that he could reach out with his hand and touch her breast, make it rise to him, and knowing, finally, that she was not hearing a word he said, Hodge had gone on talking, struggling to tease his feeling into knowledge. He burned more delicate calligraphs into the clay-dead bedroom wall. “The difference between knowing and understanding may be obscure at first—the distinction between ‘whatness’ and ‘thisness’—but it’s one we commonly recognize in ordinary speech. All men acknowledge that no human being can ‘know’ another one: I can know your name, your age, your classifications. But understanding is beyond the brain’s analysis. When I say I understand you I mean we’re the same. Imagination.”

“It’s chilly,” she said. “You notice?”

He stopped the motion of his hand, the cigarette half concealed, half showing. If she had looked she would have known how the trick was done.

“You’re right,” he said. They hung motionless in the vacuum between the light in the kitchen and the darkness beyond the window of the bedroom.

     
The cicadas continue uninterrupted.

With a vain emptiness the virgins return to their homes
With a vain exasperation
The ephèbe has gone back to his dwelling,
The djassban has hammered and hammered,
The gentleman of fifty has reflected

     
That it is perhaps just as well.

“Shall I turn up the heat?” he asked.

“Yes, do.”

“I love you,” he said thoughtfully and falsely, though it was true.

“You love your wife,” she said.

He nodded.
The truth is larger than you think.

The child in the hallway full of hollowly resounding clicks and thuds and voices studied him soberly, seeing what use he was. “Do you have any children?” she said.

“Two boys,” he said.

She turned it over in her mind. “I have a brother,” she said. “I don’t like boys.”

“Hold off judgment,” he said. “There’s good in everything.” It wasn’t true, it came to him, that she looked like Kathleen.

OHM

In the beginning was the wod, and the wod was with gord, and the wod
was
gord

He remembered his brothers walking the peak of the barn roof, Ben and Will. His heart stirred with panic and cried out in secret, Be careful! But he went on standing, as if casually, his hand lightly resting on Kathleen’s arm, and made himself go on watching until his heart was calm with probability: they had not fallen yet; they would not fall. It did not frighten him to walk there himself: he got joy in it, positive that he would not fall or that if he fell he would catch himself or if not, would not die, or if he died would not mind dying. He knew the feel of the slippery new cedar shingles under the rubber soles of your shoes, the comfortable tension at the ankles, the warm wind through your shirt. You could see everything, up there. The hills falling away to Alexander, the railroad track cutting through the fields a half-mile back of the house, the rails gleaming like newly sheared tin, ties black and neat as a logical argument fully understood, the woods in the distance yellowgreen with spring, like the grass in the cemetery, and above the woods a sky of mottled clouds as pure and venerable as his father’s stone. His emotion went out and made an aerialist’s net around the barn, and he stood stock-still, like a pole supporting a guy wire. Ben stood up slowly, with a bundle of shingles on his shoulder, saw that his younger brother was watching, and waved. All balance, alert to the gentlest stirrings of the breeze, Taggert raised his arm, waving back.

Kathleen said, “Could
we
go up there?”

“We’d better not,” he said. His heart slammed. “Our good clothes,” he began.

But she was running toward the ladder, her yellow dress sharp against the gray surroundings, her red hair flying behind her. “Come on, sissy!”

He laughed and followed. She reached the roof, in her stockingfeet now, and went easily and lightly from the ladder onto the shingles. Ben stood perfectly motionless, watching, smiling as if with certain reservations. Will scowled. “You’ll get slivers in your feet,” Tag called up to her, but she laughed. He swung around past the prongs of the ladder onto the roof and started up behind her, quick and careful. It felt good. He was not afraid for himself, and he was able to believe that she too was being careful and would be safe. She walked the peak like a tightrope-walker, her outline sharp as an open razor-cut against the sky. He went up the roof at an angle to catch up. “Now be careful, there,” Will said. Ben stood under his shingles like a boulder. She came to the end of the barn, where the square wooden silo went up to the steeply pitched silo roof, ten feet above. She looked back, throwing a smile, then started up the silo braces toward the top. He looked down without meaning to. The roof fell shimmering away then abruptly broke off, and his gaze plummeted on down to the small round rocks far below in the barnyard, fenceposts like toothpicks, hoof-prints filled with water reflecting the sky.

“You’re far enough,” he said. “Why do you have to go farther?”

She kept climbing. “To see if I fall, silly!”

He could reach up now and catch her foot if he wanted, but he was afraid to. It might make her fall. But in secret he knew that it wasn’t what he was afraid of. She might kick at him, purposely, viciously—except without quite knowing that she meant it to be vicious—and it would be he who fell. He couldn’t tell whether the fear was right or wrong; but he didn’t catch her foot. It was not because he believed her all goodness that he loved her. He had known all his life that nothing could be all goodness. Counterbalanced against the iron is the sweet lyre-playing. “Wait for me!” he called.

“You two be careful!” Will shouted. Ben was still.

She was clinging to the eave, struggling to get up over it, and though she smiled, twisting her head to look down past her shoulder, her face was white.

“Let me help,” he said. “You can’t do it alone.”

She waited, clinging to the rusted eavetrough with her elbows, the silo brace with one foot. He steadied himself below her and bent his head so she could stand on his shoulders. When she was up, he swung up after her. And now at last, thank God, she’d had enough. Getting up over the overhang had scared her, and she sat against the roof-pitch bracing her feet on the trough and looked around her, going no higher. “Thanks,” she said. He reached out slowly, all balance, to touch her hair. “Crazy little bitch,” he said. They could see for miles from here, down to where the foothills rose blue in the south. “I wish,” she began. She lifted her hand as if to touch his but thought better of it. “I wish I could be a seabird who with halcyons skims the surf-flowers of the sea.”

He smiled. “Alcman of Sparta.”

Kathleen pouted. “Pedant.”

Now, on the barn roof below them, Ben was moving again, walking slowly down the pitch with the shingles. “Dang little monkeys,” Will said.

They had not fallen, that time. That was as much as you could ask.