Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories (11 page)

Was she not aware of the sidelong looks, the grimaces, the snickers, the gradual movings away? Peter Williamson, whose initial embarrassment had given way to a sort of horrified compassion, felt he should communicate some basic truth to her. Not so much to alleviate her truly desperate loneliness, but to spare her – to spare all of them – any future disasters. If he could only intimate that a solitude with the head held high, a lonely dignity, was an admirable and noble thing. If he could only snap her out of that craven garrulousness as an act of mercy …

With considerable courage and a quite stoic denial of personal comfort – he was not given to sullying his solitudes – he raised his glass slightly to her, smiled, and nodded. We people who choose to be alone, the salutation said, have a special code to maintain.

His goodwill and generosity had been crudely betrayed. The poor woman battened on to any crust of human kindness like a scavenger. Her needs were bottomless. She came noisily and unsteadily to his table, clinging to his arm in suffocating gratitude. Perhaps in random compensation for general physical disadvantages, her breasts were large and assertive. They pressed against his arm with a smothering unseemly softness. Peter Williamson was terrified.

He was also of course a gentleman. He attempted rational conversation. Even if her voice, punctuated by breathy giggling, had been less loud and shrill, the enterprise would have been doomed. Edging his arm to safety, he had clambered helplessly around her alarming
non sequiturs.

“What sort of medical research are you engaged in?” he had asked.

She giggled nervously. “The balls of frogs are very large, you know. Comparatively speaking.” She snorted with lewd laughter. “I dissect frogs.”

Peter Williamson had thought of children raised by wolves, of people who recover from aneurisms in the brain. Perhaps she could be trained, he thought. Perhaps she could be coaxed into adult life by someone with the patience and unselfconsciousness of a saint.

But not by himself. He knew that his own carefully protective solitude could not withstand such an assault. He had eased his act of kindness, gone so madly awry, to a close. He had escaped.

And now here she was again like the Angel of Death, the old hag herself, with a pincer grip on him.

Useless to him now the harmonic genius of Couperin. In the lurid glare of Ethel's proximity he saw and heard only the harsh underside of things: the buzzing rib-cage of the harpsichord; horsehair on catgut; beads of sweat on the violinist's forehead; the bassoonist puffing and snorting like a whale, purple pain at his temples. Peter's own breath hurt him, as though it raked its way into his lungs across broken glass. His mouth was unexpectedly flooded with bile, and the fine flowering of baroque ecstasy seemed rank and lost and gone to seed.

There were some small errors. Fumbled timing. The violinist a fraction off pitch. He seemed to hear the harried and irritable rehearsals, seemed suddenly privy to murky recriminations between the bassoonist and the harpsichordist who was compressing her lips in a hard ugly line. There were red blotches of anxiety on the upper curves of the violinist's breasts.

Ethel's breasts, he was unable to avoid thinking, would bounce and jangle like a lush girl's, obscenely parodic. Her nipples would be cracked and discoloured and would exude the musty smell of bundles of uncatalogued musical scores in archivists' boxes. Or of dismembered frogs preserved in formaldehyde. She would giggle hysterically and lewdly.

He feared, from the constriction in his chest, that he was about to be guilty of some unforgivable incident – an asthma attack, a fainting fit … Freud fainted in public once, he recalled. In the presence of Jung. And Yeats had been rash in polite company, repenting in poetry.
Now that my ladder's gone
… Ah, Yeats knew all about the dark underpinnings, about
the raving slut who keeps the till.

Mercifully, in this blind reeling and ravening about through the debris of his mind, Peter Williamson stumbled against the lost ladder, the way out. He had his feet firmly back on the rung of Couperin, sweet genius of order, mathematician
extraordinaire,
orchestrator of the scattered and incoherent parts.

He was restored by the
Passacaille,
he entered the coda, he breathed easily, he applauded. When standing and bravos appeared to be in order, he stood and proffered bravos. He was in fact among the earliest, though not the first, to rise to his feet. Several of his students stood, perhaps in deference to his judgment. Ethel stood and bravoed noisily and shockingly.

Peter Williamson smiled at her warmly (he thought of the widow's mite; he gave what he could spare). He touched her arm lightly, bowed briefly, and escaped.

With all deliberate speed he lost himself among the mazy partitions of the gallery's current exhibition. The lithographs of a German artist, a woman with a respectable if modest international reputation, were featured. All the prints were done in sepia ink on ivory paper. Serene. And yet the content was harsh, the titles savage.
Death and the Old Woman. Woman Raped. Starving Child.
But the twisted sepia bodies (lavishly, lovingly grotesque), the brown curves, the ivory spaces were tranquil.

He felt at peace. The future, classically simple and filled with music, stretched ahead, a long corridor waiting to be computed. Uncluttered. It pleased him that the vault of beckoning days was deserted and private as an empty auditorium before a concert; that other lives were a distant murmur only partly heard.

Only partly and imperfectly heard, the distant murmur impinged from the far side of the free-standing partition which was the backdrop for
Old Man Stares at Death.
Whispered fragments. A not unpleasant burr of sound. A smudged print of voice from whose centre a sudden embossed detail billowed up into the senses.

“Williamson … he's so pathetic … Poor old sod.” A male voice.

And then a female one, clever-sounding, sad. The voice of the student who had been in the cloakroom: “… can't help feeling sorry … so embarrassing, isn't he? … nothing one can really do …”

Peter Williamson remained for some time staring at the earth- coloured harmony of the agonies congealed on ivory paper. He thought of Ethel and Couperin. Of Yeats:
I will lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Eventually he walked to the cloakroom and pulled on his rubber overshoes with exquisite care. An observer, he thought, would have been struck by the singular grace with which he put on his coat and unfurled his umbrella against the sleet.

The Owl Bander

After dusk, when the owls began thudding into the nets like spent tennis balls, he would take the blanket and the pouch full of tags and wait silently under the trees. Although no possible harm could come to them, other than the elastic lurch of entrapment, some of the birds became mute with terror, and clung to the soft black cotton mesh as though concussed, their huge eyes disbelieving. Others carved up the air with cries like the filing of saws, and objected with outraged wings, so that the nets cavorted like sails flapping loose.

He wondered what a psychologist would make of it. Or one of those management consultants adept at putting mysteries onto graph paper. “A study in crisis behaviours: soothing ruffled feathers in the corporate hierarchy.” Or maybe “Tailoring strategies to reaction styles.”

Goodbye to all that, thank god.

At present, he supposed, spreading his blanket on the pine needles and sitting hunched, knees hugged to chest, he was in the concussed category. Which meant that this solitary and arcane activity suited him perfectly for the time being.

When he moved along the nets he felt like a god, and drew nothing but sorrow from the feeling. He reached for the birds, gently disentangling their claws, tagging them one by one. How easily it corrupts, he thought; the power to bind and loose. The tiny saw-whet owls quivered in the hollow of his hand, submitting or not submitting – according to intricately imprinted instructions – to the aluminum label manacled around an ankle-bone frail as faith. Date, location, name of the research institution, and the owl bander's initials. So much extra freight for the little heart thumping against his fingers.

Sometimes the fragility overwhelmed him, especially that of the birds too frightened to struggle. It was futile, perhaps, but he had a ritual of blessing. He would use both hands in an act of solace and hold the tiny body (nothing but feathers and eyes) against his own for a moment. Then he would lift it high above his head, point it away from the net, and shunt it back into slipstreams of freedom.

Though I had the wings of a bird, he would think, I too would still hide behind the night and shun the rest of my species. At least for the present. Probably this would pass.

There were three nets strung across three clearings. Volleyball courts for giants. By the time he had harvested the third net, there would be more birds waiting in the first one. Theoretically he should find some birds already tagged and then notations could be made on a graphed map that was colourful with long curving arrows of hypothesised migratory patterns. Here and there, black pencilled crosses documented the resightings.

This did not concern him. It was not his field. He was strictly a casual employee, having lucked into the work through his second son, a biology student. Secretly he was pleased that he had never found a tagged owl. He wanted to believe in the possibility of defying categorisation.

Words came to him from somewhere.
You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery.

My condolences, Hamlet, he thought. I know the feeling.

It was odd the way such lines came to him now as once stock market averages and taxation rulings, obedient to other needs, had come. But perhaps it was merely that his mind, an obsessive retrieval system, was chewing up a new line of software: Shakespeare, poetry, even odder matter, the flotsam of childhood, phrases from scripture, lines of old hymns, the devout
dicta
of his father and his grandfather, strangely fallible as they now seemed to him. With logical corollaries that did not bear close examination: God helps those who help themselves. Prosperity is the sign of God's blessing.

He ran out of tags and had to return to the cabin for another batch and for a thermos of coffee. Night in a pine forest. The darkness did not seem velvet but rough with the risk of day coming too quickly, and only the sharp clean smell of the resin comforted him. In the cabin he boiled water for fresh coffee and transferred a handful of aluminum bands to his pouch. Labels. Name tags.

Cryptoglaux acadica:
very small harsh-voiced genus, largely dark brown above and white beneath. Habitat: North America. Colloquially named
saw-whet
because of resemblance of its cry to the sound made in filing a saw.

And what did it do for the owls, this Latin distinction?

He was keeping his own subversive tally of tags never seen again, relieved that odds were overwhelmingly in favour of the instinct for avoidance of pain. Surely the word would spread and this particular saw-whet colony would camp elsewhere next summer? He was heartened by the thought of the baffled biologists, the nets limp and useless as cobwebs in deserted houses.

As a child, Nick, his eldest, had been terrified of cobwebs. Not spiders, just cobwebs. He had run, one morning, right through a web stretching large as a hammock between bushes, and it had folded itself around his face and body like a sticky skin. Screaming and clawing at himself, the boy had raced round and round the house until his father had caught him and he had collapsed with exhausted sobs. Then for weeks there had been nightmares from which Nick would come blundering into his parents' room calling: “Get it off me! Get it off me!”

Poor Nick. The most baffled of them all now. And in a way, perhaps, the most precarious. As though what his father had might be infectious.

He felt a terrible pang of guilt and responsibility, on top of everything else. Letting down the side – always the worst sin. He had said it often enough himself, he who had graphed and analysed and applied labels and spouted trite inspirational slogans along with the best – or worst – of them.

Cryptoglaux acadica.

Homo nomens.
Man the labeller. Josh, his second son, had told him that. For a biology student, Josh knew a lot of peculiar things.

Homo sapiens
– though not very, it would seem.
For where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?
And where on earth had
that
come from? A Sunday School teacher? Or Grandfather Stewart?
Homo sapiens,
whose memory, while not profound, astonishes.

He had exhausted the sum total of his Latin, but he had the hang of it now and invented a little.

Homo terminus.
Redundant man. “Sidelining” was what they called it in the world he once moved in. A whispered word, obscene. By any other name, it would smell as nasty.

Homo ignoramus.
I know nothing. Not even what I knew when I started out.

He drank one mug of coffee and poured the rest into his thermos. At his waist, the pouch of metal tags chinked like thirty pieces of silver. But somebody would do it anyway and he tried to make amends to the owls. Avoid small cabins and clearings, he would murmur to them. He walked back to the nets. Beneath his feet the ground was springy as a dance floor with pine needles.

Daylight afflicted him like nausea.

The first week, in clear sunlight, he had seen something horrible: two starlings attacking an owl. Although it was a little larger than the size of both starlings combined, the owl offered no resistance and made no sound, apparently rendered helpless by morning. Of course he had shooed away the smaller birds, but then he had not known what to do with the saw-whet which was gashed in two places. At first he had tried picking it up and launching it toward one of the trees, but it had merely fluttered its wings in a dazed way and drifted back to the ground.

So he had taken it into the cabin and closed the door and darkened the two windows with blankets. After he had applied ointment to its wounds, it sat quietly on a chair back all day and they had watched each other in the soft gloom. He had lit a candle and done some more reading; he had talked quietly to the bird; he had thought a great deal: the blind studying the blind.

That night he carried the bird to a place far from the nets and released it without banding it.

Only on Fridays, the day the pick-up truck arrived with food supplies and newspapers, did he go far afield. His hiking day. Two miles at least, between him and the cabin, seemed required for comfort.

When he returned at dusk, the data for the week (which he would leave in a folder on the table) would be taken. In its place there might be a bulletin from the university's biology department, perhaps some new instructions, and more tags. Also a carton of groceries and the newspapers. The latter he made a practice of avoiding, though sometimes he would turn to the business section much as a tongue insists on exploring the tender surface of gum from which a tooth has been extracted.

Once, though, he had seen his own photograph and since then he had done no more than glance at front-page headlines. As when the tongue touches an exposed nerve and learns a lesson.

One wall of the cabin was lined with bookshelves, most of them filled with biology texts. In the beginning he had read everything the shelves had to say about owls. It was amazing. So much data about 133 subspecies. On the saw-whet alone, a ring binder bulging with Xeroxed articles from scholarly journals.

He could not connect this academic industry with the frightened little things that trembled in the palm of his hand each night. He imagined they would be dumbfounded to know so much about themselves. Yet their scientific name spawned monographs and essays, multiplied itself in encyclopedias, indices, card catalogues; could no doubt be punched into a library computer terminal to summon up a whole screenful of bibliography. Undergraduates whose knowledge of the night was limited to cramming, carousing, and seduction, wrote reams on test papers in response to that strange stimulus, the Latin label.

Cryptoglaux acadica.

What was in a name?

In one sense it had no more to do with its subject than a discarded skin had to do with a snake. Or than
Nick Stewart's Inns,
a disembodied neon cipher flashing on and off around the country like a tangled string of Christmas tree lights, had to do with him. His name like dead cells, shed.

In another sense, a name was as much a part of one as a limb. Even after amputation, its ghost survived. The nerves continued to feel pain in areas that no longer existed.

When, grieved and accusing, the two Nick Stewarts who had gone before him (“called to their reward,” as they would have said) appeared under the trees beside the nets, he would search for explanations.

I cannot be faulted, he would say. He could look their ghostly presences, grandfather and father, stern Calvinist mentors, squarely in the eyes. It was his older son, not his forebears, for whom he could find no answers.

It was none of the things you think, he would tell Nick Stewarts I and II. No lapse in clean living or church going. No slacking of enterprise or hard work. Quite the contrary. The problem was, you only had to cope with adversity, with the lure of the uphill battle. That's all you taught me: Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war. What could you possibly guess of the consequences of being too successful, of going public, of being voted out of office by one's own shareholders?

In his grandfather's time there had been only one Nick Stewart's Inn, the original split-timber north-woods roadhouse. In his father's day a dozen clones had sprung up along the major highways of the region. Now there were hundreds across the continent, his name multiplying itself like a lunatic photocopier jammed on infinity, a cipher with a life of its own that flourished in stock market quotations, in business headlines, on the contents pages of financial magazines. A living organism run amok, feeding off him like a cancer he had nurtured with his own flesh and blood.

When he thought about this he could understand why his wife would want to divest herself of it, moving out of marriage and chaos and name all in one swoop.

“It's because you won't
do
anything about it,” she had sobbed. “You frighten me. I don't recognise you.”

And his son, Nick Stewart IV, had put his arm around her shoulders and had spoken quietly to his father, pleading.

“Can't you see what you're doing to us. Dad? It doesn't make sense. Do you think any of us gives a damn about the shareholders' vote? What's a boardroom shuffle compared with some of the things you've faced? How about the time you were a day away from bankruptcy?” His son's eyes were mystified and full of pain. “It's not as though we've lost money. We can go in a new direction. Find a new power base. Show them who the fighters are.” As a final reproach he demanded: “What have you always said to me about quitting?”

Poor Shirley. Poor Nick. Especially poor Nick, who had followed the received wisdom of three generations to the letter, overcoming nightmares and bed-wetting and social awkwardness and a wretched nervousness of examinations; picking himself up indefatigably, like the much-battered roadrunner, to reach for the academic and corporate prizes.

After so much allegiance to winning, what right did he have, as a husband and father, to pull out the linchpin? If he could just click a switch inside of himself again. If he could just locate it. It was like groping in the darkness for the button on a circuit-breaker fuse.

The day after Shirley left. Josh had found him mulching the roses, something he had not done in the decade since their lifestyle had run to a paid gardener.

“You know that job I had last summer, Dad? Banding owls? My prof's looking for someone again and I'm already committed elsewhere. I just wondered if you'd be interested. If you wanted to get away from things for a while?”

Then he had said, “I'm not worried about you. Nor about Mom. She just doesn't want to interfere with the way you choose to … reassemble. And it scares her to watch. But I'm worried about Nick. I think when you decide – you know – which direction to go next, it'll be easier for him.”

He had looked at Josh in amazement, feeling the same quiver of excitement he had once felt for the acquisition of new real estate.