Read Collected Fictions Online
Authors: Gordon Lish
Collected Fictions (7 page)
THE MAN WHO STOOD
, who stood on sidewalks, who stood facing streets, who stood with his back against store windows or against the walls of buildings, never asked for money, never begged, never put his hand out. But you knew that's what he was doing—asking, begging, even though he made no gesture in your direction, even though all he did was fix you with his eyes if you let him do it, and, as you passed, made that sound. It was
doobee doobee doobee
—or it was
dabba dabba dabba
. It was always the same, just the one or the other, but you never tarried long enough for you to hear if there was more to it.
He was wearing high-heeled shoes the first time I saw him. They were women's shoes, or they were women's backless high-heeled slippers. I don't remember which. Yes, I think they were bedroom slippers—pale blue, furred, little high-heeled slippers.
I saw him the first week I moved here. I always saw him after that—it did not matter what the weather was. He was here in every kind of weather, backed up against a wall or against a store window—
doobee doobee doobee
or
dabba dabba dabba
.
He worked my neighborhood.
He did what he did in my neighborhood.
I gave him a dime the first week. He took it. If he was not begging, then he was taking money. But I never gave him anything after the one time.
I was angry about giving him that dime. I felt it marked me as a sucker. I don't think I would have felt that had the man not shown up again the next day, the next week, every day of every week of all the weeks after that.
Every time after that first time I always passed him by—
doobee doobee doobee
or
dabba dabba dabba
, oh so very softly—angry that the man was there, a witness to the fool I was.
That dime should have saved his life, gotten his back off public construction, sent him away to another neighborhood, changed his song.
But he's gone now. He hasn't shown up for weeks.
It's a relief. I feel better about living here now—but it's not on account of that dime, not on account of the shame that I gave it and shame that I never gave another one after giving it.
It's terror his absence relieves me of.
It's the worst fear I ever had.
IT WAS WHEN
the snows came this winter that I got very afraid of the man.
I want you to know how, I want you to hear how, the man made me so afraid.
I'd gone to get my son home from a playmate's house after dark. It wasn't that many blocks there and therefore not any more back. But the snow was at its worst and there was no one on the streets, not all of the way there and almost not all of the way back.
We were just a block from home, my boy and I, and the man was on that block, standing on the corner, his back to the wall of something. There was no way for anybody to get home without passing him. So I got my boy tight by the hand and took him out into the street to do it.
The man just stood there—no gesture, no hand reached out. He didn't get me with his eyes because I wouldn't let him do it. But there was no not hearing the man crooning
doobee doobee doobee
or crooning
dabba dabba dabba
—just always a whisper and never not loud.
A car came skidding along the street. My boy and I were moving up it now and the car was moving down it, skidding, sort of careening, a reckless driver playing with the calculus of skating his machine in the snow.
I have such a childish imagination.
I thought: "He'll hit us, that driver." I thought: "My son will be hurt." I thought: "There will be no one to help me, no one but the man I always passed."
I saw myself kneeling over my son. I saw myself begging the man for him to help.
I heard him answering—
doobee doobee doobee
.
Or
dabba dabba dabba
.
But this can't happen now, can it?—not now that I have had the thought.
THERE IS NO STORY
in the sentences I will write, no program to make matters come out. If matters do come out, then it is a resolution they accomplish all by themselves. No help is needed from me, nor is any solicited from you. All I am going to do—as briefly as fair play will allow—is give evidence. Everything else, if there is anything else, will take care of itself. In my opinion, it already has.
This concerns two families.
Families are families, and in this way are alike. But in every other respect, the two families that I have in mind, and all other families, have nothing in common. Of course, I issue this disclaimer mindful that its issuance disables it or anyhow makes of it a folly.
I cannot help what cannot be helped. It is what squats malignantly between writer and reader. But I have nevertheless done what I can to warn you away from speculations that will uncover nothing at all—though the caution will doubtless inspire the effort.
I want to answer this last, but I am out of time.
IN ONE FAMILY
, there was a divorce. In the other, there was not. There was, however, in the latter case, a murder—whereas in the former, there was an attempt at one.
Let us begin again.
In one family, one spouse planned to murder the other. When the endangered spouse discovered the plan, he fled. He fled from one coast to the other and got a divorce. But up until that flight, he had stayed put. He said he had stayed put for the children. It was a good reason. There was proof of this when the children showed up damaged. They were very damaged. It will seem excessive to say it, but it is what both spouses themselves said.
"The light in them will go out."
When the spouses said this, they must have had in mind the radiance of children. But who knows?
I was never a parent.
THERE WERE TWO CHILDREN
in each of these families. As regards the amplitude, or the relative fall-off therefrom, of the light in the second set of children, the evidence isn't all available for the recording of it yet.
But here is some that is. It is the declaration of the spouse that worried about the light.
This is what he said:
"My boy came to me, the younger one. The older one already knows. I never told him, of course. But he figured it out. Now the younger one has too. I love the older one more. I can admit that—it is all right if I do. Loving the younger one less makes it harder, however—harder about what he said when he came to me. He said:
" ‘I know.'
"I said, ‘What do you know?'
"He said, ‘I mean about him.'
"I said, ‘Him?' I said, ‘What do you mean, him?'
" ‘Why don't you kill him?' my boy said.
"That's when I knew he really knew.
"But I said, ‘He's our friend.' I said, ‘What a thing to say!'
"My boy said, ‘That's what a man would do.'
"I don't know where that boy of mine got that from, but my boy said that.
"Then he said, ‘You're afraid. You're afraid to kill and you're afraid of him. It's because he's stronger.'
"My boy said that, the younger one. My boy said all of that, the one I love the less."
This spouse was afraid. He was afraid of the things the boy said he was. His boy knew that. His spouse did too. This is why she was not afraid to do what she was doing. This is why the man she was doing it with was not afraid, either.
They all knew whose the fear was—especially did the spouse who had it.
But now it was worse. That father was afraid of that boy. He was even more afraid of that boy than he was of the other two things he was afraid of.
I think it was because he loved that boy the less.
There was fear in the first family too. The spouse who ran away was afraid. That is why he did it.
The two children were afraid when the father ran away. They thought everybody would run away. Well, this was when the light in those children began to go out. They were turned down, turned out, both parents were willing to agree.
They agreed on there having been some loss of light. But they did not agree whom to blame for this. So the spouse who wanted to murder in the first place set out to try it again. She would have to go from coast to coast to try it. But considering the greatness of her aim, the journey seemed no tall order.
She wanted to get to the one who would know the most about the loss of light. You can see how she would.
She set out by car to do it.
MEANWHILE
—meanwhile in these sentences, not meanwhile in these events—the father of that boy called that boy back to him.
"I want to explain," that father said.
"You're a coward," the boy said.
"Give me a minute," that father said. "Don't be so quick to call a man a coward. I want to make one last appeal to you. May I make one to you?"
"That's what cowards do," the boy said.
But perhaps the boy knew this father loved him less than this father did his other son. Children so often know. It happens when they say their prayers and must give a sequence to those they number in them.
"It takes a strong man to go along with a sadness," that father started off. "It takes a very strong man to stay put. It takes the strongest man for him to be a coward if this is what his son, in a father, has to have."
How this came out of his mouth was not how that father had wanted it to. It was hard to get his point. He knew he had one, but what you just heard was the best that father could do.
"It takes a strong man to kill," is what that boy said, and it took him no time at all for him to say it.
The boy was not all that young. But he was too young for the idea the father thought he had in mind. That was when the father had another one.
He went to the man his son said was the stronger. This is what the father said to the man:
"You're stronger than I am. Your body is stronger. Your mind is stronger. I am going to tell you something. My boy knows. The older one knows, but now the younger one does too. It's okay about the older one—because I love him the more of the two—and I think it is all right for me to say that. But because I love the younger one the less is what makes it really bad for us. I can't do what I'm doing anymore. I have to do something else. But am I strong enough to do it? You know I'm not. But you are. Tell me if you are following me so far."
"I'm way ahead of you," the man said. "You have to do something, but you can't do it. So you want me to be the one to do it for you, check?"
That father liked this. He said, "What proof that you're the stronger! You see the point? Kill her for me. What is your answer?"
"I don't mind," the man said.
"You owe it to me—don't you think?" that father said as fast as he could, already compiling the sentences that would turn over his sly purpose to the son he loved the less. It would test that father to postpone the tale of his irony. But that father was very strong. He could wait.
"I like it," the man said, "that complexity of reasoning. It's strong."
That father was at the mercy of utterance. He said, "But you're complexer for knowing it."
SHE TOOK THE CHILDREN
with her. She planned everything—the same way she had planned it in the first place. But now she had to use a map—for where was her navigator, for where was he indeed?
She marked off intervals, the mileage each person in the vehicle would have to drive for the driving to come out even-steven. But the family was one fewer than it had been. This is how come the younger boy got the wheel in Utah instead of in Idaho. He said his prayers when he got it—then drove under a truck with twenty-four tires.
I DON'T THINK
I would be writing this story if the facts did not force it. Actually, it's publishing this story that I do not think I would be doing unless I had a very pressing—really an irresistible—reason. It is probably necessary for me to say that I always imagined such a reason would one day come along. But I imagine many things—and why this one has caught up with me and most of the others have not is only the way it is with luck.
Not too much should be made of it, I suppose. My brother's, actually—
his
bad luck. But I believe that when I arrive at the end of what I want to say, I might also arrive at seeing the bad luck mine too. This is what comes of imagining things. It is also what comes of making promises you never intend to keep—or, worse, which you do not keep but which you try to convince somebody (even yourself) you have.
I made a promise like that once. It was a long time ago, and the one who inspired the promise was a child. A girl in this case. It was my conceit to think that she would remember what I had promised her, but I don't think she really did. After all, the year was 1944 and she must have had other things on her mind, there being a war going on at the time and her being twelve or thirteen or fourteen (despite a large opinion to the contrary, I am not all that much a student of children, and am especially inferior, I have often noticed, at pinpointing their ages), with all the calamitous worries that seize a child of such an age when its father has gone away. But she always wore a Campbell tartan and a watch much too big for her delicate wrist—and in those days in Devon and those days in my heart, a promise of any sort to a gentle child in plaid (with a weight too great for her to bear) was not a thing I would not want to make. Besides, she had a little brother and always took good care of him, fretting if he were within earshot of a fact too awful for a small boy to hear.
At any rate, I promised the girl a story (I had wanted to be a writer then, and for too long a while thereafter I was one)—and some years later I wrote a story that was meant to appear to be the fulfillment of that promise.
Of course, it wasn't. A writer, especially the sort of writer I was trying to be, can't write stories like that—a pretty story when a child asks for one, a squalid story when
this
is the favor she asks. What I am paying for now is that I shabbily led this young lady to believe otherwise. I wrote a story, a not very sincere story, nor a very graceful one (the years since demonstrate that the world disagrees with me in this judgment—but all I care about is that the story was mainly made up and is bruised by a very great fracture in its posture of narration), and when the piece was cast into print, I sent her a copy of the magazine sheets with a patch of paper pinned to the first page. I hadn't even the courtesy to set out my one sentence in my own hand, but instead typed the following, after a greeting that consisted of no more than the two lovely parts of her lovely English name: "I always keep a promise—I mean, p-r-o-m-i-s-e." Well, I hadn't—and what I am paying for now is the lie I tried to get by with then.
I often read a Viennese logician who, I think, would go along with such reasoning. And let's not overlook the penalty for too much reasoning. So you see the kind of logic the fellow favored when he lived?
It will presently be clear that I am, however, chiefly paying for my having a brother I love more than I love my silence. It will presently be clear that by publishing—and
only
by publishing—the little story I want to tell you, can I stop him from doing a thing he believes he must do. It is an act of extreme gravity, of extreme gravity, in all the spheres of spiritual prospect human imagining can consider. Or it is an act of no consequence at all. I am not certain. I am too overcome to rest for very long with a certain opinion. So I choose instead to do the safe thing—to put this story out for print.
All of this, I sincerely
promise
, will presently be very, very clear. One does not talk about what I am preparing myself to talk about,
and
talk in defiance of habit, unless one is utterly sworn to being very, very clear. I have sworn myself to the effort to let nothing interfere with clarity of the first order. Not even the sound of one hand clapping must be let to raise a diversion from the sentences I am going to set down—but, reader, reader, how I hear that one hand clapping now!
MY BROTHER WAS AN ACTOR
until radio gave out. After that, he tended bar on Fifty-fifth Street and on Fifty-seventh Street, and then he went to Oslo and then he went to Zurich, and when he came home he came home with a wife, a Swiss, a psychiatrist, and in time she proved herself a psychopath. But the time was not soon enough, for by then my beautiful brother and my handsome sister-in-law had a son. They named him, I felt honored to learn, David, called him Chap, and that is what he is called to this day, seventeen years later, fifteen of which Chap and my brother have not, not once, seen each other.
There was a divorce when Chap was two, and his mother, not long after, set up practice in El Paso, reasoning aloud that Chap's asthma would be more manageable there—the aridity—reasoning to herself, my brother supposes, that my brother would be taught what grief feels like.
You have my word for it that my brother did not need to be given the lesson. You have my word for it that my brother did everything short of seizing the office of the mayor of El Paso to force his residence there, close to Chap, close to the largest love then in him. You also have my word for it that my handsome sister-in-law did everything short of hiring ruffians to strong-arm the father well beyond the city limits. It was easy, considering. The woman, you will remember, is a psychiatrist, and a kind of despot therefore. And my brother, as you by and by will see as the facts are by and by disclosed, was vulnerable in a very particular regard.
My brother—I shall call him by a different name here—my brother Smithy would return to New York with a sick heart, and when its sickening had worsened, he would go back to El Paso to cry out at the gates of the city. My mother tells us that these weekly, then monthly, pilgrimages went on for almost four years and were then gradually abandoned as the facts proved unmoving, unalterable, permanent. I was living in New England then, kept in very random touch with family, and—it will be no surprise to them if I admit it—discouraged them from doing other than returning the discourtesy. You see, at the time I was still dominated by the pretension of writing, although I was well past the point where I had fled from doing it in public. But, of course, I did hear from my mother and from my sister—and, when Smithy had moved back to New York from Switzerland, from Smithy himself-—that he had taken a second wife, a Swiss again, a woman somewhat older than the first and anything but a psychiatrist. This sister-in-law, whom I have not seen to this day, had banking as her profession, and still has it.
I do not need to see her to know that she is handsomer than the psychiatrist, for her photographs show up in the magazines and in a newspaper that is regularly attentive to very handsome and very active women, and my mother clips and forwards every single picture through an agent who has long given excellent service as an intermediary. And Smithy, who telephones often now that I have devised a truly private line, never fails to remind me that I am the brother-in-law of one of the world's most admired women.
But I do not need Smithy's reminding, nor my mother's clippings, to know how breathtaking Margaret must be—for the child of her marriage to my brother I have five times seen in the flesh, and he is the very word of loveliness, in this as in all things.
The boy's name is Rupert—and he is the child of all our dreaming.
If I say more about Rupert in regard of his unearthliness, I will not be for long free from confusion. I will—what I want to tell you will—fall victim to the disorder of sentiment, and I have promised you clarity. I have also promised someone squalor. I now intend, in all scruple and with haste, to keep both promises—and to save my brother, and everyone else, in the bargain.
Rupert will be five on his next birthday. This is the last I will say about my brother's second golden son, comma purposely omitted. The next voice you hear will be Smithy's, and I can make no boundaries for
him
. His italics are entirely his own.
"
STOKE UP A CIGARETTE
; this is going to take a long time."
"I quit smoking. Snuffed my last butt the tenth of October. If Mom would tell you
any
thing, she'd tell you
that
, and you promised me you were going to start
listening
to Mom, remember?"
There was a silence—not a good silence.
"Smithy? Hey, buddy, you there?"
"Please don't buddy me right now, Buddy. Please. And
please
don't kid around. I've finally thought the thing out, and what I've got to do—Buddy, dear God, I cannot believe I am saying this out loud—I am going to kill my son."
I did not shift the receiver to my other ear. I did not do anything that I can especially remember. I think if I had had a cigarette handy, I would have lit it. If there had been cigarettes in this house, I would have smoked them all. If I could have asked him to wait a half hour, I would have gone into town and bought a carton. Anyway, I did nothing—and I
said
nothing—because it was progressively occurring to me that I did not know
which
son Smithy meant, and that maybe
he
did not know either, and that if I said something that suggested one boy or the other, the suggestion might tilt my brother in one direction or the other.
Have I told you that my brother has twice been
away
? I know I haven't—because that is a fact that would certainly mislead you, and the one thing this piece of writing must
not
do is mislead you. But when one has a brother who has
twice
been away and who
married
a psychiatrist, one can oneself be misled by such facts. You cannot read enough of the Viennese logician to escape
certain
facts, and these may be among them.
"Buddy? Buddy, did you hear what I
said
? You want to go get a smoke now, big brother?"
And then he started crying, sobbing wretchedly. I had always imagined men could cry like this, but I had never heard it. It went on for a long time, and I was glad it did, because I believed that whatever had given it to occur would wear itself out this way and that would be that.
But it wasn't. Smithy stopped his weeping as abruptly as he'd started it, and when he began his first new sentence, it moved to its period with austere dispassion.
There's something else I have not told you. If he wanted, my brother could give the Viennese logician cards and spades. Smithy is very, very smart, endowed with an intelligence unsurpassed in our family and as statuesque as any I've come across. Moreover—and this is why I am not sure I am doing the right thing but only what I, like our Smithy, am convinced I must do—Smithy's unyielding custom is rationalism, all the way to the gallows if this were his destiny. There has never been anyone who could break him of the habit, and this goes for our older brother too—who could, just mentionably, break anyone of anything if he wanted to, and who would not flinch over breaking himself into nineteen pieces to do it. Except Smithy of his rationalism, of course.
But our big brother never had a very long run at it.
Anyway, Smithy's next sentence, and all the sentences that came rushing after that one and that I would not have dared to interrupt even to assert
Fallacy of the Middle!
were proportioned and stately in the organization of their argument. And this is what my brother said—and why my brother has concluded that he must kill his son—and why I am publishing what the reader may apprehend as a "story," but which Smithy, ever the rationalist, will understand is a disclosure one step short of my informing the police and a step quite far enough to stop him in his tracks.
And, of course, the boy Chap will have his fair warning.
It is the least a loving uncle who has made his fortune (and his misfortune) writing can do. He can write as he is able. He can write a "story" that no one but the ones who most matter to him will quite be certain is true. I
do
see now that it is only through the miracle of the falsehood of fiction that I can catch up the people I love from the truth and consequences of what they might do. The cost to me is very slight in comparison—the exception in a habit for silence (Are you smiling now, dear dead brother, master of ceremonies in all my deliberations?) and the reinstatement, for a time, of the shame that covers me whenever I play the thief of hearts and come like a highwayman to the unsuspecting page.
Speak
, Smithy! I am the instrument by which you may submit your supreme reasoning and the dark circumstance that stirred it to unfurl its awful syllogism. And when you have stated your case, I will return for a parting courtesy to the reader, a gesture I swear to be greater than that to which I proved equal when I wished to say the right thing to soothe that splendid girl of Devon. I am thinking I owe a very particular politeness to the reader—who, for the purpose before us, and as do his mother and father, I call Chap.