Late Stories (3 page)

On or Along the Way

T
he announcer on the classical music radio station says the next piece will be a symphonic poem, “or what's also called a tone poem,” by Rachmaninoff. The title is “The Rock,” and the piece is based on a short story by Chekhov called “Along the Way.” The story, she says, is about an elderly destitute man and a rich young woman who meet at an inn during a blizzard. “They're sort of thrown together in a room the innkeeper calls ‘The Traveler,' since it's reserved for travelers passing through or stranded there.” The man and woman talk for hours and gradually warm to each other. “There's a chance—one could even say a hope—they could become good friends or, at the very least, traveling companions for the rest of their journey. But the woman leaves the next morning in a sledge that the man, standing in the road, follows with his eyes till it disappears. He eventually begins to look like a huge rock covered by snow,” she says, “hence the title.” He doesn't know the story, but the ending is a familiar one for Chekhov. Two people from vastly different backgrounds or economic circumstances or both who meet for the first time and talk intimately together, often after having lived in the same district their entire lives and known about each other for years, and whose lives . . . Well, there's a possibility that after their first meeting they could come together . . . their lives could . . . even marry, or help each other in some way . . . but . . . Anyway, what seemed promising suddenly stops, usually because one of them doesn't say something to keep the other from going, or the weather's cleared or the wheel or axle of one of their carts has been
fixed or the obstacle in the road's been removed, and they go their separate ways, with little chance they'll meet or speak to each other again. He was never good at summarizing stories, not even his own. But the ending to this story, from what the announcer said, is one Chekhov used several times in a similar way, and maybe a lot more than that, since he's read only about fifty of the 568 stories and sketches his wife said Chekhov wrote. The Rachmaninoff piece comes on. For the last minute or so there was an announcement for a free lieder concert at the music academy downtown and a recorded ad for this radio station saying sixty percent of its budget comes from listener membership contributions, “so won't you take a few minutes of your time and become a member by dialing the following phone number or pledging online?” He listens to the music for a minute, doesn't particularly like it, then doesn't like it at all and turns the radio off. Sometimes what to him is awful music can be depressing. This station plays a lot of it, most of it in the morning till around ten—oompah marches, schmaltzy waltzes—although it plays a lot of good music too. As for becoming a member, he and his wife have been one for about twenty-five years, though he now takes the senior citizen membership. But the story. If his wife were here he'd ask her about the Rachmaninoff piece. She's the Chekhov expert. His stories are what she did her master's and doctorate on: her thesis on the beginnings of his stories—about twenty of them—and her dissertation on the endings: ten. He'd say “Do you know of a Chekhov story called ‘Along the Way'? I don't. And how can a symphonic tone poem, which is what I always called them, be based on a short story? Especially one with a plot like what the announcer gave, for we're not talking opera here, which seems mostly like a long conversation between a man and woman in an inn and ends with the man standing in what I assume's deep snow and looking like a rock.” She might say she's read more than 300 of his stories
and sketches in Russian—she once told him that—and about half the 400 or so translated into English, and the one he mentions isn't familiar to her, although the ending is like several of his. “‘Along the Way'? Are you sure the announcer didn't give another title? Though there are a number of his stories that have different titles for each new translation of it. ‘Grief,' for instance, which I've also seen as ‘Heartache' and ‘Misery,' and in one translation, ‘Sadness,' though I could be wrong on the last one. I know there are at least four different titles for it in the English versions. If you want, I'll go through my notes on his short stories, and if I don't find anything I'll look at my story collections of his, both in Russian and English. If I find the story in English, do you want to read it?” He'd say “I would, and then maybe you could read it for the first or second time and we'll talk about it. That's always fun. And it won't be a waste of time. I've never read a story of his, except for some of the minor sketches, which aren't stories, right?—that wasn't anything but clear and readable and good, and twenty to thirty of them were great. I don't think I can say that about any other short story writer. Maybe Hemingway and Babel come closest.” So she'd check, she might say, maybe not now but by the end of the day. She has the entire 16– or 17–, or whatever the number is—he could go into her study and find out—volume collection of all of Chekhov's stories and sketches in Russian. He'll check the collections of Chekhov's stories he has in English. He goes into the living room, pulls the three collections off a bookshelf and finds the title “On the Way” on the contents page of one of them. Has to be it. He turns to the last pages of the story. A man, standing in a snowfall “as if rooted to the spot” and gazing at the tracks left by the woman's sledge-runners, soon begins to resemble a white boulder. He then reads the first few pages of the story, flips through the rest of it and goes into her study with the book. “Hurray, hurray,” he says, “I found it. In an
old Modern Library edition of Chekhov's stories that I think I bought when I was in college, translated by that old reliable, Constance Garnett. Or I think it was by her. It doesn't say who the translators are, except for around five of the stories on the acknowledgments page, and she's got all of them but one. Maybe it's at the end of the book,” and he looks and it isn't. “But it's almost got to be by her. The copyright is 1932.” “Nothing out of the usual,” she might say, although she's gone in to this before. “And other than for the top translators today, who are almost as well known as the authors, things haven't changed much since. Translators were always poorly paid and often didn't get credited in the book. But woe is me if the translation didn't read that well or the story in the original wasn't that good. Then they got the blame. ‘Sloppily translated'; that type of criticism—the writer, of course, getting off free. Let me see it.” He holds open the story to the first page. “Oh, yes,” she might say, maybe after reading a paragraph or two, “now I remember it. Not one of my favorites, which is why I never taught it in class, but still, as you said, a good story. Two people at an inn during a tremendous snowstorm. Howling wind. He relied on that a lot. Also the storm beating on the windows and roof. If he had a weakness, it was that. The woman's supposed to be a good deal younger than the man, who's described as elderly, though he's in his forties, so maybe only old for that time and place. She's a landowner, or her brother is, whom she's traveling to by sledge. The man was once fairly prosperous—I believe he even once owned an estate, or ran one—but for a long time has been down on his luck. At first they don't seem to be a likely match. But by the end, because they're so kind and frank and helpful and even solicitous to each other, you think, if you didn't know Chekhov better, they might team up. I don't think it ever happens in Chekhov, in his fiction or plays, or it's rare when it does. He's traveling with his young daughter. A very nice little girl,
but sad, like so many children in his stories—so put upon and being dragged all over the place by her father.” “The synopsis of the story the announcer gave,” he says, “never mentioned the daughter. She probably didn't have the time, or the program notes for the Rachmaninoff piece didn't say so.” “If I remember correctly,” she might say, “the woman has some money of her own and is very sympathetic to the young girl and would have made a wonderful surrogate mother to her and a good wife to the man. I forget what happened to the man's wife. I think she died or deserted him for someone else, and he was left with the daughter. That would explain his descent.” “What I'd like to know is how you make a symphonic tone poem out of a story like that,” he says. “An opera, as I said—a one-act one—I can see, although the snow might be a problem.” “Oh,” she might say, “they know how to do snow on an opera stage.
La Bohème
, for instance. But I have to confess I don't really know what a tone poem is.” “I guess what Richard Strauss did in his
Don Juan
and
Till Eulenspiegel
and so on, and what Sibelius and Smetana did in theirs. A narrative in music, though I'd think it'd be a very difficult form to put across. But we'll forget the music and read the story—I've already started it and I know how it turns out—and talk about it sometime today?” “You finish it and I'll catch up,” she might say. “I'll also read it in Russian, if I have the time, in case the translation misses some of it.” “See you later, then,” he says. He goes into their bedroom, plumps up and piles the four bed pillows, her two and his, on top of one another against the wall, and lies back on them and reads the story. After he finishes it he goes back to her study. She's not there.

Cape May

T
hey used to go to Cape May about once every two years, mostly to observe birds at the bird observatory there. Went three times, once in the spring and twice in the fall, before she got too sick to go. It wasn't something he much liked doing: standing on the beach for a couple of hours in the morning and then in the afternoon, sometimes when it was cold, trying to find birds through the binoculars he'd bought her. Also, dragging her in her wheelchair through the sand to a spot she wanted to see the birds from, and then dragging the chair back to the paved path, sometimes with the help of a birder or two. She didn't mind the cold, or said she didn't. He'd tuck in her afghan around her chest, wrap her mohair shawl around her shoulders and neck, pull her wool cap down over her ears and put her gloves on for her. “You warm enough?” he'd say, or something like it, and she'd say “Now I am. Thank you. So let's go find a bird we've never seen.” There were always lots of birders on the beach, no matter how cold it was, some with what seemed like expensive binoculars and others with elaborate telescopes on tripods. Sometimes one birder would be operating two or three telescopes, all pointed in different directions. Everyone out there was very friendly and nice and most seemed to know a lot about the birds they'd come to watch and photograph. Some would ask her if she wanted to look through their telescopes: they had them focused on a bird's nest or bird in a tree or hidden in a bush, sometimes hundreds of feet away. Maybe not that far, but a good distance, certainly far enough away where it couldn't be seen
without a highpowered telescope or binoculars, which hers weren't. He doesn't think she ever saw a bird through one of these telescopes, which he did, several times. For one thing, her eyes were bad because of her MS. And because she was sitting in a wheelchair she usually couldn't get her eye close enough to the lens. A couple of the telescope birders even took the tripod off and held the telescope up to her better eye, is the way he'll put it—he forgets if that was her left or right—but they could never keep it steady enough to focus it on what they wanted her to see. He doesn't think she ever even saw a bird through her binoculars. She couldn't hold them, so he held them to her eyes but could never get them aimed or focused right for her. Still, she liked being on the beach or observation platform with all those serious bird watchers. And every so often a bird would fly near them—one they'd never see around their house or neighborhood, where they also used to take walks to observe birds, or even in Maine, where they went to every summer for two months. And someone would shout what kind of bird it was and later tell her, or someone else would, or she'd look it up in the bird book she always took to the beach with her, what its identifying marks and other things about it are so she could recognize it on her own next time. But they also in Cape May, or at least he did with her, have some of their happiest moments together. Not at the bird observatory but in a restaurant which, once they discovered it, they went to for dinner every night in their three trips to Cape May. It was a fluke or just good luck, chance, whatever it was, how they got to it. The first time they went to Cape May they weren't able to reserve a room in any of the hotels in town. All of them were booked because of a convention that week, and the bed and breakfasts, which had a few available rooms, were in old buildings with steps leading up to the front porch and more steps and staircases inside. They always brought her portable ramp with them on trips like this,
but it was only good for three steps at the most. Also, the bathroom in these B&B's, the owners told him on the phone, were too small to turn around a wheelchair in. So, because it was the off-season, the closest open lodging they could get to Cape May was a four-story motel about ten miles away. It was an ugly place, with a pink façade and an enormous neon sign in front and tacky furniture inside. But it had an elevator to their floor, a kitchenette to make breakfast in and a roll-in shower in their bathroom, which surprised them—not even some of the best motels and hotels they'd been to had that—and it kept them, along with the free reserved handicapped parking space, coming back to this motel the next two times. What he's saying is that if they had been able to book a suitable room in a Cape May hotel the first time they went, they no doubt would have walked to a restaurant nearby—several were open—and not come upon this one on the outskirts of town. They were driving to Cape May from the motel their first night there to look for a restaurant to have dinner in and saw a sign for this place along the way. “Think we should check it out?” he said, and she said “What do we have to lose?” They went down a side road. The restaurant's parking lot was almost filled. If they didn't have handicapped plates, they wouldn't have found a spot. “A good sign,” he said. He looked at the menu, liked what he saw, got her out of the van and they went inside. It was a huge place—probably could accommodate a hundred-fifty diners at one time—with a large lobby where they waited for their table to be called. It was crowded every time they ate there, and they always had to wait for a half hour or more, which was fine with them. The lobby had several buffet tables in it, one for shrimp cocktails and tiny crab cakes, another for several kinds of freshly shucked oysters on the half shell, and a third just for martinis and Manhattans. She loved oysters, maybe more than any other food. While he didn't know how anyone could eat them raw—fried, he
liked. He got a half dozen oysters for her and a martini for him and they sat beside a small end table, it seemed, and she ate and he drank. “Sure you won't have one?” she said. “Five is plenty for me.” “Positive,” he said. “Like a sip of my martini? It's delicious; just right.” “You know I hate the taste of them.” “Thought I'd offer, though, and same with me your oysters. How are they?” “The best, ever.” After swallowing each one—he'd first squeeze a lemon wedge over it and have to bring the oyster to her mouth with that little oyster fork, holding the shell beneath it till it was inside—she gave a big almost rapturous smile and said “Ummm . . . ummm . . .” and maybe after the second or third oyster “You don't know what you're missing.” “I know what I'm missing and I don't miss it. Did I ever tell you of the time I ate a foul raw oyster at the fish restaurant Oscar's on Third Avenue and all evening thought I might die from being poisoned by it? Long before we met. Maybe ten years before. My father was in the hospital—Mt. Sinai—and my mother and one of my sisters and I had just come from seeing him there.” “Don't go into anymore details about it. I don't want to ruin my eating these oysters. You survived, I'm thankful to say. And not because we wouldn't be here if you hadn't and I wouldn't be enjoying these oysters so much. What kind did the shucker say they were?” “Some local Indian name. Lots of syllables, half of them vowels. But okay, I won't say anything more about my one bad oyster. Eat. Enjoy. That's what we're here for.” So it was that smile of total delight she always had while eating oysters at this restaurant—its name, he forgets too, but he thinks he could look it up online if he wanted to—that made the trip to Cape May for him. The ummms. The look of complete satisfaction. That she was so happy, sitting in her wheelchair in the lobby, smiling at him after being fed each oyster and he saying “I'm so glad you're enjoying this. I really am. I think I sometimes live just to have you enjoy something and be happy.” “You're
sweet,” she said a couple of time after he said this. “And you're beautiful,” he said the first time. “I know that oysters, and I can't say I subscribe to this notion, are supposed to be an aphrodisiac, but I'm the only one eating them. Sure you wouldn't like the last one?” “Wouldn't think of it. And I won't need it, if that's what you meant. Do you want it to be the last one or should I get another half dozen for you, maybe of a different kind.” “Six is more than enough for me. We have a whole meal to go. And seeing what they do with oysters, I'm sure it'll be great. Tomorrow. We should probably come here tomorrow night for dinner. Hang out in this waiting area for a while before dinner, even if they say our table's ready right away, and you'll have your martini and I'll have my oysters. And next time we come to Cape May to see the birds, and we have to come back—we're having too good a time—we'll come here again and have the same things. Or I'll have three of one kind of oyster and three of another, and maybe you'll try one of their Manhattans.” “Okay with me. I like both, and why go anywhere else? This place is as good as they come and I love this room and watching the other people waiting and the surroundings too. The things on the walls. Your personal shucker. Everything.” “And the martini's that good too?” “I'd have another,” he said, “—by my drinking it so fast and it's such a large glass too, you know how much I like it—but I want to have wine with dinner and be able to drive back to the motel.” “I wish I was still able to drive. Then you could drink as much as you want.” “Don't worry about it,” and he held up the oyster fork and she smiled and nodded and he gave her the last oyster. Then he held her hand and drank what was left of the martini with his other hand and said “Cape May's a great place. I mean, we haven't seen much of it yet, but it certainly seems like it. Although if it wasn't for this restaurant, I don't know.” “I'm glad I like looking at birds so much and suggested we come here,” she said. So they came back to
Cape May two more times. She gave up on taking the binoculars the last time. They also didn't take the portable ramp. Found they didn't need it. Went to the same restaurant for dinner every time. That would make six times they waited in the lobby there. She always had a half dozen oysters on the half shell, sometimes three of two different kinds and sometimes all of the same kind. He had a Manhattan once but didn't like the way it was made. Too sweet. The other times he always had a martini, straight up with both an olive and lemon twist in it and made with the best English gin they had or a Russian or Swedish vodka. About a year after the last time they went he said “Like to go to Cape May in the next month or so for a couple of days?” She said “Maybe this time we should pass it up. We always do the same thing, go to the same place, so let's try something different or somewhere we haven't been to in a while.” “Oh, but that restaurant, whose name I always forget. How I'd miss it. By now we could find it blindfolded, and we don't have to make a reservation for it because we actually like waiting in its lobby for a table.” “It's a wonderful place,” she said, “but we ought to go back to Chincoteague at least once, and have dinner at that fish restaurant on the water we always liked. The one connected to a seashell shop. And we can take a drive or two through the national wildlife park there and see its birds. They're probably the same ones as at the beach in Cape May; part of the same flyway, isn't it?” “Okay,” he said. “Time getting there is just about as long, maybe a bit longer, but the drive's just as easy, and isn't the Blackwater bird observatory along the way? That restaurant you mentioned isn't as good as the one in Cape May and not as much fun to go to. But you're right. We haven't been to Chincoteague for a while, and we always had a good time there. Maybe, since we were last there, there's a new seafood place in town better than the one we used to go to, and which has oysters you'll find as delicious as the one in Cape May had.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Chincoteague oysters. They were just about my favorite at the Cape May restaurant, but no local oyster was ever in season when we went to Chincoteague.” “So we'll do that, next month, for a weekend, or two days during the middle of the week, at that motel nearest the water—The Retreat, or something, I think it's called. The one with a heated indoor pool I liked and handicapped facilities almost as good as the awful-looking motel in Cape May had. But I think it's called The Refuge, not the Retreat. That would make sense for that area, the motel so close to the National Wildlife Refuge. The Refuge Inn; that's it exactly. Now I know what to look up when I make a reservation.” But she got very sick the next month and then very sick a few times the next year, and they never went.