Presence: Stories Read online

  What the hell do I know, ignorant, accordion-pleated mind that I have, but I know style in anything. The great thing is not winning, it’s riding the friggin’ horse nobody else could stay onto. That’s the bastard you want to ride. Where the other jocks look and know the horse wants to kill you. That’s when the flag stretches out and your corpuscles start laughing. Once I went to see my father.

  I never told this to anybody, and you know how much I talk. Honest, I never told this. I made this television thing, interviewing ugly authors about their books, the line was that a jockey could actually read words, and it went over big till I threw myself in the Jag and drove to Mexico, I couldn’t stand it. I’m all for stealing but not pickpocketing, these authors weren’t any goddam good authors, but every week you got to make over them like it’s Man O’War did the mile in nothin’ pissing all the way and a blind jock on top. Anyway the station gets this letter from Duluth asking if I was born in Frankfort, Kentucky, and my mother’s name is so and so, and if I was all them things he’s probably my old man. This silly old handwriting like he wrote it on a tractor. So I throw myself into a plane and drive up to the door and he’s a house painter.

  I just wanted to see, you know? I wanted to lay my both eyes on him. And there he was, about seventy or a hundred. He left when I was one. I never saw him. Now I’d always dreamed of him like he was a high roller or some kind of elegant thief or maybe a Kentucky Rousseau or somebody stylish with broads, and left to seek his fortune. Some goddam thing interesting. But there he is, a house painter. And lives in the nigger section. I’m the last of the holdouts, I can’t stand them. But there’s this one next door, a real nice guy, and his wife was nice too. You could see they loved him. And I’m standing there. What did I come for? Who is he? Who am I if he’s my father? But the crazy thing is I knew I belonged to him. It’s like you said, I’m the son of my father. I knew it even if he was a total stranger. I just wanted to do something for him. Anything. I was ready to lay down my life for him. After all, who knows the situation? Maybe my old lady drove him out. Who knows the inside of the outside? So I ask him, what do you want?

  I’ll get you anything, I said, that is within my means, although I was loaded, it was after the Derby. He was small too, although not as small as me. I’m so small I’m almost un-American, but he was small too, and he says, The grass in the back yard gets so high and thick I can’t push the mower through it. So if I had one of them mowers with an engine on it.

  So I grab the phone and they send over a truckload of all the kinds. And he was all afternoon goin’ over each one and finally he picks out one with a motor bigger than this friggin’ table, and I buy it for him. I had to leave to make the plane back because I promised Virgil I’d be in San Pedro to guard some broad he had to leave there a whole night, so I go into the back yard to say goodbye. And he wouldn’t even turn the motor off so we could talk quietly. And I left him enjoying himself, joggling around that yard behind that friggin’ mower.

  Christ, how did I get so drunk! Those two broads across there have been lookin’ at us. What do you say? What’s the difference what they look like, they’re all the same, I love ’em all.

  [1962]

  The Prophecy

  Not all, but some winters in those parts are almost unendurable. A fog settles into the old Dutch valleys toward the end of November and never really goes away until April. Some nights it suddenly appears on the ridge tops, leaving the lowlands clear, and no one knows why it moves about, but it does, sometimes settling around a particular house for days at a time and nowhere else. Then it goes away and reappears around another house. And some winters the sun never properly comes out for two months at a time. A grayness like water drowns all the views, and the trees drip all day when their branches are not covered with creaking ice.

  At the start of winter there is always hope, of course, that it will be a decent one. But when, day after day and week after week, the same monotonous wind sucks the heat out of the house, and there is never even a momentary break in the iron sky, the old people first and then everyone else gradually change their temperaments. There are unaccountable arguments in the supermarkets and at the gas station, lifelong enmities are started, people decide to move away and do, forever, and there is always a rash of unnecessary road accidents. People break arms, hitting trees whose locations they know by heart; there are always one or two who get run over by their own cars rolling back down the driveways; and decisions are made out of desperation, which permanently change the course of many lives.

  Toward the end of December of such a winter Stowey Rummel decided to supervise personally the hanging of his architectural drawings and the display of his models for a permanent exhibition of his work in a new Florida university whose campus he had designed a few years before. He was in his mid-fifties at this time, long past the establishment of his name and the wish to be lionized yet once again, and it was almost a decade since he had sworn off lecturing. There was never a doubt any more how his structures would be received; it was always the same unqualified success now. He could no longer build anything, whether a private residence in his Pennsylvania county or a church in Brazil, without its being obvious that he had done it, and while here and there he was taken to task for repeating the same airy technique, they were such fanciful and sometimes even playful buildings that after a time the public’s sense of recognition overwhelmed any dispute as to their other values. Stowey Rummel was internationally famous, a crafter of a genuine Americana in foreign eyes, an original designer whose inventive childishness with steel and concrete was made even more believably sincere by his personality.

  He had lived for almost thirty years in this same stone farmhouse with the same wife, a remarkably childish thing in itself; he rose at half-past six every morning, made himself some French coffee, had his corn flakes and more coffee, smoked four cigarettes while reading last Sunday’s Herald Tribune and yesterday’s Pittsburgh Gazette, then put on his high-topped farmer’s shoes and walked under a vine bower to his workshop. This was an enormously long building whose walls were made of rocks, some of them brought home from every continent during his six years as an oil geologist. The debris of his other careers was piled everywhere; a stack of wire cages for mice from his time as a geneticist and a microscope lying on its side on the window sill; vertical steel columns wired for support to the open ceiling beams with spidery steel cantilevers jutting out into the air; masonry constructions on the floor from the time he was inventing his disastrous fireplace, whose smoke would pass through a whole house, visible all the way up through wire gratings on each floor. His files, desk, drafting board, and a high stool formed the only clean island in the chaos. Everywhere else his ideas lay or hung in visible form—his models, drawings, ten-foot canvases in monochromes from his painting days—and underfoot a windfall of broken-backed books that looked as though their insides had been ransacked by a maniac. Bicycle gear sets he had once used as the basis of a design for the Camden Cycle Company plant hung on a rope in one corner, and over his desk, next to several old and dusty hats, was a clean pair of roller skates, which he occasionally used up and down in front of his house. He worked standing, with his left hand in his pocket, as though he were merely stopping for a moment, sketching with the surprised stare of one who was watching another person’s hand. Sometimes he would grunt softly to some invisible onlooker beside him; sometimes he would look stern and moralistic as his pencil did what he disapproved. It all seemed—if one could have peeked in at him through one of his windows—as though this broken-nosed man with the muscular arms and wrestler’s neck was merely the caretaker trying his hand at the boss’s work. This air of disengagement carried over to his apparent attitude toward his things, and people often mistook it for boredom in him or a surrender to repetitious routine. But he was not bored at all; he had found his style quite early in his career, and he thought it quite wonderful that the world admired it, and he could not imagine why he should al
ter it. There are, after all, fortunate souls who hear everything but know how to listen only to what is good for them, and Stowey was, as things go, a fortunate man.

  He left his home the day after New Year’s, wearing a mackinaw and sheepskin mittens and without a hat. He would wear this same costume in Florida, despite his wife Cleota’s reminders over the past five days that he must take some cool clothes with him. But he was too busy to hear what she was saying. So they parted when she was in an impatient humor. When he was bent over behind the wheel of the station wagon, feeling in his trouser cuffs for the ignition key he had dropped a moment before, she came out of the house with an enormous Romanian shawl over her head, which she had bought in that country during one of their trips abroad, and handed him a clean handkerchief through the window. Having found the key under his shoe, he started the engine, and while it warmed up he turned to her standing there in the dripping fog and said, “Defrost the refrigerator.”

  He saw the surprise in her face and laughed as though it were the funniest expression he had ever seen. He kept on laughing until she started laughing with him. He had a deep voice, which was full of good food she had cooked, and good humor; an explosive laugh that always carried everything before it. He would settle himself into his seat to laugh. Whenever he laughed it was all he was doing. And she was made to fall in love with him again, there in the rutted dirt driveway, standing in the cold fog, mad as she was at his going away when he really didn’t have to, mad at their both having got older in a life that seemed to have taken no more than a week to go by. She was forty-nine at this time, a lanky woman of breeding, with an austere, narrow face that had the distinction of a steeple or some architecture designed long ago for a stubborn sort of prayer. Her eyebrows were definite and heavy and formed two lines moving upward toward a high forehead and a great head of brown hair that fell to her shoulders. There was an air of blindness in her gray eyes, the startled-horse look that ultimately comes to some women who are born at the end of an ancestral line long since divorced from moneymaking, which, besides, has kept its estate intact. She was personally sloppy, and when she had colds would blow her nose in the same handkerchief all day and keep it, soaking wet, dangling from her waist, and when she gardened she would eat dinner with dirt on her calves. But just when she seemed to have sunk into some depravity of peasanthood she would disappear and come down bathed, brushed, and taking deep breaths of air, and even with her broken nails her hands would come to rest on a table or a leaf with a thoughtless delicacy, a grace of history, so to speak, and for an instant one saw how ferociously proud she was and adamant on certain questions of personal value. She even spoke differently when she was clean, and she was clean now for his departure, and her voice clear and rather sharp.

  “Now drive carefully, for God’s sake!” she called, trying to attain a half-humorous resentment at his departure. But he did not notice and was already backing the car down to the road, saying “Toot-toot!” to the stump of a tree as he passed it, the same stump that had impaled the car of many a guest in the past thirty years and that he refused to have removed. She stood clutching her shawl around her shoulders until he had swung the car onto the road. Then, when he had it pointed down the hill, he stopped to gaze at her through the window. She had begun to turn back toward the house, but his look caught her and she stood still, waiting there for what his expression indicated would be a serious word of farewell. He looked at her out of himself, she thought, as he did only for an instant at a time, the look that always surprised her even now, when his uncombable hair was yellowing a little and his breath came hard through his nicotine-choked lungs, the look of the gaunt youth she had suddenly found herself staring at in the Louvre on a Thursday once. Now she kept herself protectively ready to laugh again, and sure enough he pointed at her with his index finger and said “Toot!” once more and roared off into the fog, his foot evidently surprising him with the suddenness with which it pressed the accelerator, just as his hand did when he worked. She walked back to the house and entered, feeling herself returning, sensing some kind of opportunity in the empty building. There is a death in all partings, she knew, and promptly put it out of her mind.

  She enjoyed great parties when she would sit up talking and dancing and drinking all night, but it always seemed to her that being alone, especially alone in her house, was the most real part of life. Now she could let out the three parakeets without fear they would be stepped on or that Stowey would let them out one of the doors; she could dust the plants, then break off suddenly and pick up an old novel and read from the middle on; improvise cha-chas on the harp; and finally, the best part of all, simply sit at the plank table in the kitchen with a bottle of wine and the newspapers, reading the ads as well as the news, registering nothing on her mind but letting her soul suspend itself above all wishing and desire. She did this now, comfortably aware of the mist running down the windows, of the silence outside, of the dark afternoon it was getting to be.

  She fell asleep leaning on her hand, hearing the house creaking as though it were living a private life of its own these two hundred years, hearing the birds rustling in their cages and the occasional whirring of wings as one of them landed on the table and walked across the newspaper to perch in the crook of her arm. Every few minutes she would awaken for a moment to review things: Stowey, yes, was on his way south, and the two boys were away in school, and nothing was burning on the stove, and Lucretia was coming for dinner and bringing three guests of hers. Then she fell asleep again as soddenly as a person with fever, and when she awoke it was dark outside and the clarity was back in her eyes. She stood up, smoothing her hair down, straightening her clothes, feeling a thankfulness for the enveloping darkness outside, and, above everything else, for the absence of the need to answer, to respond, to be aware even of Stowey coming in or going out, and yet, now that she was beginning to cook, she glimpsed a future without him, a future alone like this, and the pain made her head writhe, and in a moment she found it hard to wait for Lucretia to come with her guests.

  She went into the living room and turned on three lamps, then back into the kitchen, where she turned on the ceiling light and the switch that lit the floods on the barn, illuminating the driveway. She knew she was feeling afraid and inwardly laughed at herself. They were both so young, after all, so unready for any final parting. How could it have been thirty years already? she wondered. But yes, nineteen plus thirty was forty-nine, and she was forty-nine and she had been married at nineteen. She stood still over the leg of lamb, rubbing herbs into it, quite suddenly conscious of a nausea in her stomach and a feeling of wrath, a sensation of violence that started her shivering. She heard the back door opening and immediately went through the pantry toward it, knowing it must be Alice.

  The old woman met her, having already entered, and was unhooking her yellow slicker with her stiff white fingers. “Something’s wrong with my phone,” she said, proving at once that she had come with a purpose and not to intrude.

  “What do you want to do?” Cleota asked, not moving from the center of the pantry, her position barring the way to the kitchen door. Her anger astounded even her; she would never have dared bar the way if Stowey were here, and she thrilled at her aggressiveness toward his old sister.

  “I’d better call the company, hadn’t I?” Alice asked, already indicating in her tone that she recognized the outlandish barrier and was not prepared to go out at once.

  “Well, you can certainly use the phone,” Cleota said and turned her back on the old woman and went to her leg of lamb on the table.

  Alice, wearing calf-height rubber boots and a fisherman’s drooping-brim rubber hat, got to the phone and held it away from her ear, blinking papery eyelids and avidly inspecting the kitchen as she waited for the operator to come on. Beside the instrument—between it and a flour canister—stood a Fiji mask, a carved, elongated face. She turned it absent-mindedly.

  “Please don’t, Alice!”


  The old lady turned in such quick shock that her deep-brimmed hat slid and remained sideways on her head. Cleota, her face swollen with feeling, bent to the oven and put in the meat.

  “It was facing toward the wall a little,” Alice started to explain.

  Cleota stood erect, her cheeks red now. The house was hit by a slap of wind, a push that shuddered it. “I have asked you not to touch my things, Alice. I’m having guests and I’ve a lot to do. So will you please do what you have to and let me get on with it!”

  She went to the refrigerator, opened it, and stood half bent over, looking into it, trying to concentrate on what she had thought to take from it.

  The old lady put down the phone. “Yours is out too, I guess.”

  Cleota did not answer, remaining before the open refrigerator, unable to think.

  For a moment they stood there waiting, one for the other, as they had waited at odd moments since Alice had moved into the house down the road nine years before. Now the old woman hooked up her slicker, her watery eyes glancing hungrily about the kitchen as though for some new detail she might not have seen before. She had no thought to ask what the matter was, not because she clearly knew but because she took for granted she was hated by this woman with a reasonless hatred that nothing could ever dissolve. In her autobiography, which she wrote at every day in her kitchen and in good weather under the apple tree behind her house, she was developing the concept of human types, unchangeable personalities created by a primeval spirit, each of which had the function of testing others who were equally unchangeable. Cleota, in her book, was the Eternally Dissatisfied. She did not blame Cleota for her personality; indeed she pitied her and knew that nothing she could say or do would ever mitigate her need for an opponent, an enemy. Cleota, like so many other perversely incomprehensible phenomena, was Necessary.