Peace, p.5
Peace, page 5
“You promised me, Mr. Weer, that if I would prescribe for your stroke you would cooperate with me—take certain tests.”
“I had forgotten all about you. I thought you were gone.”
“Wait a moment, I have to move this aside. There. It’s a mirror, see? With little wheels on the side.”
“Like a fun-house mirror.”
“Exactly. Stand in front, please. See, as I move the wheel, the area of the mirror adjacent to it becomes more or less distorting; do you understand what I mean?”
“It’s metal, isn’t it? It couldn’t be glass.”
“I believe it is actually plastic, with a flash coating of silver. You understand how it works?”
“Of course.”
“Very good. Now I want you to stand right there and adjust the wheels until your reflection appears just as it should.”
I spin the magic wheels, giving myself first a suggestive immensity in the region of my sex organs, then the corporate gut expected of a major industrialist, then the narrow waist and exaggerated shoulders of a working cowboy, and at last setting everything to rights. Lips pursed, Dr. Van Ness notes the numbers on each dial (there are five) and compares them with numbers on a slip of paper he takes from his desk.
“How did I do?”
“Very well, Mr. Weer. Perhaps too well. Your image of each of the psychosomic body areas is perfect; in other words your I.D.R. is zero. I would say this indicates a very high level of self-concern.”
“You mean that’s how I look?”
“Yes, that’s exactly how you look. Frightening, isn’t it?”
“No, I don’t find it so. I hadn’t thought I was quite that tall —I mean, on reflection; when I adjusted the thing, of course I did the best I could.”
“You aren’t a particularly tall man, Mr. Weer.”
“No, but I’m taller than I thought. I find that comforting.”
“You used the word ‘reflection,’ a moment ago, in a rather ambiguous sense. Were you aware of it?”
“I meant to make a joke. For myself. I’m afraid I do that often—I don’t expect the people I’m talking to to understand them, and they seldom do.”
“I see.” Dr. Van Ness writes something on his pad.
“You know, all I really wanted from you was advice about the effect of exercise on my stroke. I’ve got that, and now I really should wipe you out.”
“Do you really think that you could do that, Mr. Weer?”
“Of course. All I have to do is turn my mind toward something else—naturally I can’t prove that to you, because you wouldn’t be there to see the proof.”
“Do you feel you can control the whole world—just with your mind?”
“Not the real world—but this world, yes. In the real world I am an elderly man, sick and alone, and I can’t do anything about that. But this world—your only world now, Van Ness—I have conjured from my imagination and my memories. This interview between us never took place, but I wanted advice about my stroke.”
“Could you make me stand on my head? Or turn blue?”
“I prefer to have you remain yourself.”
“So do I. You may recall, Mr. Weer, that when I advised you —about this future stroke—you promised to look at some cards for me. Here they are.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Turn over the first card. Tell me who the people are and what they are doing.”
2 OLIVIA
BOBBY BLACK DIED, in time, from the spinal injury he suffered on my grandmother’s stairs. Shortly after his funeral, I went to live with my aunt Olivia. I was then (I think) eight or nine years old. The Blacks were—understandably, no doubt—bitter and troubled, and the social situation must have been quite tense. My parents decided to spend half a year or more touring Europe, but I was judged too young to go. Whether my aunt volunteered to care for me or was in some way dragooned into doing so (she was, I think, at that time dependent on my father for at least a part of her income), I do not know. Certainly I felt unwelcome initially, and though that in time changed I do not believe my aunt ever accepted me as a more or less permanent resident in her home—to all intents and purposes, at least as far as she was concerned, I was an overnight guest who would, or should, leave the next day; a day that was long coming, so that, for me now, my whole stay has become one enormous morning, interminable afternoon, and unending evening, all these spent at a house across the alley and five lots down from my mother’s (grandmother’s) old one, to which I must have tramped a dozen times, in the first weeks after my parents’ departure, to peer beneath the shades of its curtained windows. I was mocked mercilessly for this by my aunt whenever she discovered me, and I have seldom felt more abandoned and alone than I did then.
Aunt Olivia’s house was quite different from my grandmother’s, horizontal and sprawling (though there were two stories, a cellar, and an attic) rather than high, vertical, and secretive. In my grandmother’s house I had always felt that the house knew but would not tell; in my aunt Olivia’s that the house itself had forgotten.
The windows were wide. There was a bay window facing the street, and another, on a side wall, overlooking the rock garden; there were window seats before these, and at several other windows as well—window seats that, so it now seems to me, were mostly filled with sheet music, though it may be that I am confusing them with the piano bench, which, opening in the same way and possessing the same sort of padded top, must have seemed to me then to be akin to them, a receptacle equally alien and magical —my grandmother’s house had had no window seats, and pianists sat at a stool whose particular virtue it was to go up or down when spun.
The walls, rambling walls that never ran straight for more than one room at a stretch, were undecided in other ways as well: sometimes of wood painted white, sometimes of brick—and the bricks not always of a family but various, some soft old crumbling building bricks—in other walls the hard, glassy, vitreous paving bricks for which the local kilns were (locally) famous. The shutters were green. The roof green, too, the cedar shingles welcoming, in spots, bright mosses, and the dome over the Doric-columned cupola above the parlor green as well—vert de Grice.
The house extended nearly to the sidewalk, so that there was, properly speaking, no front lawn, only two flower beds given over to ferns, since nothing else would grow in the shade of the elm trees that stood between the sidewalk and the street. One side yard held the rock garden with its tiny toppled elves and gnomes, and the birdbath pool from which the neighborhood cats, climbing the fence and equally contemptuous of the ceramic guardians and the penned dogs, regularly abstracted the goldfish from Woolworth’s my aunt as regularly replaced.
The other side yard, which received more sun, boasted green grass and a blaze of zinnias and marigolds and similar flowers. The back yard held kennels for such of the dogs as were not currently permitted the house, and wire runs.
For my aunt raised Pekinese.
And, indeed, she raised them in the most literal sense, and while every other breeder sought diminution, my aunt’s dogs, though they retained the pugged faces, bulging eyes, and bowed legs characteristic of the breed, were selected and bred for size, for she was intent upon restoring the “Lion Dogs”—those ancient, ferocious T’ang dogs and Foo dogs which were to medieval China what the mastiff was to Europe; and of which the present Pekinese are only toys, miniature copies, lifetime puppies, intended to amuse and flatter the children and the sheltered, silly women of the Forbidden City.
As such, my aunt felt that they were not for her. She was not sheltered—she had lived alone and more or less independently since the death of her father, treating my grandmother, her mother, a good deal more distantly than my own mother did. Nor was she silly. Indeed she might be said to have been one of those people who are driven to a sort of absurdity for want of silliness, for she made herself ridiculous by caring nothing for so many of the things valued by us—the people about her, her relatives and friends, and the very now-grown girls with whom she had shared a desk in that pleasant brick school at the upper end of what was then a village, a school at which she had somehow learned (or at least taught herself) such a different curriculum than the one her teachers held important. She was a feminist of the sort who despises women, and a bluestocking of a blue that was nearly black, an amateur of every art, of music (she played the piano, as I have indicated, and the harp, too), of painting, of poetry and literature of every kind; she sculptured clay, arranged flowers—begging sweetly from neighbors and friends those materials (and they were many) her own garden did not provide, and using, as well, wild flowers, and branches broken from wild flowering trees in their seasons, and cattails— and furniture and pictures, and this last not only in her own house, but in the home—when the mood struck her—of anyone who would allow her past the door. She subscribed to intellectual and scientific periodicals that would never otherwise have been seen in Cassionsville, and when she had read them gave them to the library, so that a stranger to the town—a drummer, say, just disembarking from a train and seeking an hour’s innocent reading before a night spent at Abbott’s hotel—would have thought the town to be a very hotbed of intellectuality when the fact was that you might have killed it all, if you were so fortunate as to possess a motorcar, on any spring day when it proceeded, with pansies and lily of the valley on its small hat, from Macafee’s Department Store diagonally across Main Street to Dubarry’s Bakery.
She had never married. She lived alone with her dogs in her big house, had her laundry done by a washerwoman, and twice or three times a month had another woman—seldom the same one twice running, as there were five or seven of them she, as she said herself, “spread her trade over to make it interesting for them”—in to clean, a slavey with whom she would gossip for two hours at lunch, overpay, and accuse, as soon as she had left, of theft.
In bad weather particularly she might never venture out of doors for days, and I remember, in the year before I went to live with her, hearing—on frosty mornings when I was on my way to school—her harp across the snow. When the mood was on her, and especially on Sundays, she might pay calls on everyone; but other women seldom called on her. She frightened them a little, I suspect, and made them envious with her freedom even while they feared her detachment from all those things that gave meaning to their own lives, from husband and children and cooking and sewing, from the farmwife mentality without the farm, from vegetable gardens (which nearly everyone had except my aunt Olivia, because if you had no vegetable garden, what would you have to can?) and chickens (which many vegetable gardeners had as well) and relatives who came to dinner and brought the children.
We were my aunt Olivia’s only relatives, and no one ever came to dinner at Olivia’s, because she did not cook, and often had for her supper (I recall how shocked I was when I was first there) only a pickle (from the gift jar of some pickling neighbor) and a cup of tea. Her suitors—she had three when I was staying with her—came in the evening, having, like everyone else, eaten dinner in the early afternoon. She would give them tea and cake, or tea and cookies, cake and cookies from Du-barry’s, telling them, laughing, that as she would not cook for herself she would not cook for any man, that they would have to starve if they took her, and they, one and all, swearing that she should have a cook, and a maid, too, if she were to marry them. Professor Peacock—that lean, good-natured man—offered, too, if she preferred, to starve with her, and even proposed that they should set up housekeeping in the boarding house (an entire two towns off!) in which he lived, declaring that they would chop a hole in the wall between their rooms so that they might say they lived, “like the troglodytes known to classical writers” and “to Montesquieu,” in a hole, eating dumplings on Sunday and creamed chicken on Monday, and hash and tongue on other days save when some new arrival, some promising new member of the faculty, was at table and the future of the whole establishment turned, as upon less than a hair, on his judgment— when they would have roast pork and dressing, particularly if it was July. This professor, whom I had seen on the street once or twice without identifying before I came to my aunt Olivia’s (for he arrived by train, sometimes as often as twice a week, to call on her, staying the night at the hotel and returning to his classroom in the morning by an early train), was the only evidence we had that there was—as there was—a university only thirty-five miles off, a green and living branch borne by the winds and currents of love far out into a sea of ignorance, a sea of chickens and pigs and beef cattle, of corn and tomatoes, where it could be lifted dripping from the water by the weary mariner who, pressing his face to its foliage, might still smell the chalk, without ever knowing to what point of the compass (if indeed it were to any point of a merely human compass) the fabled land of learning lay.
(I have just been describing, without knowing it when I began —or I should say burlesquing—an engraving that hung in my grandmother’s front parlor. Its place, I believe, was next to a girl who gripped ’mid perilous seas the Rock of Ages; and it depicted Columbus plucking from the wave, to the amazed delight of his onlooking men, a sprig of dogwood, with the setting sun sinking in a most promising welter of light in the background. When I was a boy, this picture always gave me the impression, as I believe it was intended to, that the New World was uncreated prior to its discovery.)
Just what it was Professor Peacock taught I never learned, but from what I recall of his conversation I should say it was anthropology, or American history, though it might as well have been half a dozen other things, and those subjects only his avocations, the things he did best rather than the thing he was paid to do. For after all, if the lives of most men are examined in detail, it will be found that they have been experts of immense stature in some unremunerated field, the strategy and theory of some sport or the practice of some craft, have had an exhaustive knowledge of old circus posters or eighteenth-century inn signs or the mathematics of comets; and nothing so distinguished Professor Peacock from the ruck of men as his air of amateurishness. He was a man who seemed to love everything he did too much to do it well. His shoes, as an example (and the most typical—the point at which he was clearly most like himself), were always either too loosely tied or not tied at all, the laces dragging the ground like the laces of a very small boy’s. But, unlike that small boy, Professor Peacock never tripped over his. He took long strides, and he was, in any event, agile of body without being graceful, a flurry of elbows and knees as he nearly, but not actually, dropped his umbrella or his spade, or went, with a startling quickness that frightened my aunt Olivia as much as myself, over the edge of a cliff (we called them “bluffs”) on a rope, a leggy brown spider that never fell.
And at this point I had better describe Cassionsville and its surroundings more fully than I have yet done. I have just been outside refreshing my memory, though there is not a great deal to be seen from the garden behind my room, and I have not— not yet—walked around the whole house as I proposed. Only to the far side of the fallen elm, where I thought for a time, as I leaned on the handle of my ax, that I would climb into the branches; but in the end I did not. This damp early spring hurts my bones. The weather? Oh, yes, the weather. The south wind doth blow/so we shan’t have snow/but I think rain is quite likely.
Cassionsville is situated on the Kanakessee River. The valley is open to the west, typical Midwestern bottomland of which a hundred acres will support a family very comfortably. To the east, where the river is narrower and swifter, the land grows progressively stonier, and the farms (surprisingly) smaller as well as poorer, with more cattle and more woodlots, and less plowing. The graveyards, as I have often noticed, are older in the east, for the first settlers came from that direction and the poorest farms are often owned by the oldest families—the farmhouses often with walls of logs, covered now by clapboards or horsefeathers. The Weers—our family is supposed to have originated in Holland, the “Black Dutch” descendants of Philip II’s Spanish soldiery—at one time operated a water mill on the upper river.
Cassionsville was built at the first ford. This no longer exists; the river has been bridged, and the wide, low banks (still visible in old photographs of Water Street) narrowed and filled in to make more space for buildings. The longer, more important thoroughfares run east and west, following the river. They are River, Water, Main, Morgan, Church, Browning, and so on. The north-south streets are all named for trees: Oak, Chestnut, Willow, Elder, Apple, Plum, and Sumac. And others. The town is hilly, and the streets—the north-south streets particularly—are steep. Several creeks once ran through the town on their turbulent way to the Kanakessee, but they were long ago confined to conduits, and paved over, and now are merely storm sewers, their very names forgotten, though they still empty, through wide, round mouths, their floods into the river. West of the town, in broader, quieter water, there is a long, stony island which used, at about the time I imagined myself visiting Dr. Van Ness, to harbor a hermit called Crazy Pete.
To the north and south, above the valley, are rugged and even picturesque hills, too rough for farming. Much of the timber there was cut fifty years before my boyhood and, by the time I first saw these hills, had been replaced by a second growth which was then approaching maturity; but lost among the small, dark valleys there were still (then, and I suppose some remain even now) untouched pieces of the original climax forest of America. Small streams ran through these valleys, chuckling over rocks; and there were deer and rabbits and foxes and even, I think, some wildcats; but the bears and wolves and mountain lions were all gone, gone so long ago that I believe Hannah was the only person I have ever heard speak of them, and even to her they were only a childhood memory.
