Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (24 page)

Supposed to say a few words, her father said, so why don’t you?

Poetry doesn’t redeem, Emma thought. Saintliness doesn’t redeem. Evening doesn’t redeem the day, it just ends it.

Her father waited with a fistful of dirt ready to fling in the hole.

She was small and thin and bitter, my mother. No one could
cheer her up. A dress, a drink, a roast chicken were all the same to her. She went about her house without hope, without air. Her face was closed as a nut, closed as a careful snail’s. I saw her smile once but it was not nice, more like a crack in a plate. What on earth had she done to have so little done for her? She sewed my clothes but the hems were crooked.

While Emma was silent a moment, trying to remember something more to say, to recite, her father released his fistful of earth and he went for the shovel. He shoveled slowly as if his back hurt. Dirt disappeared into dirt. The morning was cloudy but the grave was cold and dark and not so deep as it had been. The nails went out—animal eyes in a cave. Layer after layer: sheet blanket mothballs board, earth on earth on earth. Too bad we couldn’t afford to do better by her, her father said, but we didn’t do too bad. Emma realized he hadn’t cared what her words were, probably hadn’t heard. Words were one of the layers—to ward off what?

They hadn’t any prayers. Emma hated hymns. Hymns weren’t private enough. And you were told which one to sing. This morning, please turn to [ 25 ]. The grave filled and a little mound rose over it, the soil looking less raw, more friable. Emma rode back to the house alongside the ironing board which was quite dirty and bedraggled. The board bounced as it hadn’t bounced coming out, when it was wedged. Emma tottered to the mailbox and looked in. That was how it was inside the box, she supposed. Empty, even though

In the days, the weeks, the month which followed, Emma disappeared almost completely into her unattachments. She freed herself of food, of feeling, father. The fellow was a wraith. She was a shadow no one cast. He no longer farmed, though he often stood like a scarecrow in the field. Grief, Emma decided, was the explanation. But his grief was no concern of hers. She thought about freeing herself from verse when she realized she
always had been free, for she had never respected, never followed, the form or been obedient to type.

She waited for the world, unasked, to flow into her, but she hadn’t yet received its fine full flood. What if it weren’t a liquid, didn’t flow, but stood as if painted in its frame? What if it were like a fly indifferent to its own death? No matter. She was freeing herself of reflection. All of a sudden, she believed, the lethal line would come: “The dead birds fell, but no one had seen them fly …” Perhaps it would be that one. So what if it was shot from a sonnet. The only way flies could get into a poem would be as a word. “They were black, their eyes were shut. No one knew what kind of birds they were.” Each night, night fell in huge drops like rain and ran down the eaves and sheeted across the pane. He’d move somewhere in the house. He’d move. She’d hear. “Quick as dew off leaves.” The sound will be gone in the morning.

Mother beneath the earth. Others are, why not she? He waits in the soybean field for me. I must carry the shovel out to him. It is thin as I am. Almost as worn, as hard. Mother has no marker. Many lie unknown in unsigned graves. Might we hear mother rustling under all her covers, trying to straighten her knees? To spend death with bended knee. He’ll never mark her. The mound will sink like syrup into the soil. Weeds will walk. Perhaps black wood-berries will grow there as they do in Bishop’s poem. My steps are soundless on the soft earth.

Emma struck her father between his shoulder blades with the flat of the spade. She hit him as hard as she could, but we can’t suppose her blow would have amounted to much. She heard his lungs hoof and he fell forward on his face. Emma flung the spade away as far as she could a few feet. What can you see now, she wondered. Or did you always see dirt?

She hadn’t considered that a blow meant as a remonstrance might have monstrous consequences. She bounced floatily back
to the house somewhat like a blown balloon. That’s it: rage redeems. What does? evening.

And evening came. The dead birds fell. Found in the field. She hadn’t missed him a minute. She hadn’t for a moment worried about how angry he would be, or how he might take his anger out on her, so uppity a child as to strike her grieving father in the back. Found facedown. After a rainstorm. Heartburst. Creamed corn is a universal favorite. Dark drops fell. The field was runneled and puddlesome. Emma peered more and more through the round thread-wound shade pull. And felt the flow. The world was a fluid. Weights have been lifted off of me. I am lonely am I? as a cloud

Emma was afraid of Elizabeth Bishop. Emma imagined Elizabeth Bishop lying naked next to a naked Marianne Moore, the tips of their noses and their nipples touching; and Emma imagined that every feeling either poet had ever had in their spare and spirited lives was present there in the two nips, just where the nips kissed. Emma, herself, was ethereally thin, and had been admired for the translucency of her skin. You could see her bones like shadows of trees, shadows without leaves.

Some dreams they forgot. But Emma Bishop remembered them now with a happy smile. Berry picking in the woods, seeing shiny black wood-berries hanging from a bough, and thinking, don’t pick these, they may be poison … a word thrilling to say … 
poison …
us. Elizabeth Bishop used the phrase
loaded trees
, as if they might like a gun go off. At last … at last … at last, she thought: “What flowers shrink to seeds like these?”

Luther Penner, after many years, had perfected the art of secret revenges. They were pallid, to be sure, these revenges; they were thin; they were trivial and mild compared to the muscular and hearty recoveries of honor that brighten history and make it bearable to read; yet they were revenges so secretly conceived and so deftly executed that the spider might have learned a more entangling web, the wasp a surer sting, by studying them. It was Luther Penner’s solemn purpose to improve on Nature and prefigure Providence, and to this end he had, during the time of which I write, become a master of the art of his invention. Completely conscious of his powers, he did not hesitate to address himself in his journal as
cher maître et ami
, taking care to compose each entry in the third person and to invest it with all the featureless precision of analytical philosophy. There was no affectation in this formula of greeting, for he had come to regard the creative part of himself with astonishment and awe as having separate existence and richly independent means. Always himself a modest, humble man, he knew his genius had not only discovered an art and carried it to perfection, it had also seized upon the idea of the transcendental revenge itself and, like Descartes, had come into possession of its essence in one searing afternoon of vision. While he felt he could ascribe
the necessary preparation for this moment to his lifelong study of revenge—a study which had till then resulted only in a catalogue of every kind of offended honor with its appropriate requital—he could not honestly suppose that from these studies, by themselves, had come such a revolutionary notion as The Pure Revenge
en soi
; never, without the aid of the Upper Air, could he have realized the secrecy essential to it, or discovered the subjective ground of its satisfaction, or understood so well its immeasurable moral power. Indeed, the idea of The Pure Revenge puts within the reach of every ordinary man and woman a truly formidable weapon, a weapon which balances at once the forces of the weakling with the bully’s, and one which must, in time, surely tip the scales to the nobler side; for despite the fact that these revenges are in figure pale and wasted, and regardless of the measures which a man may take to guard himself against the vigorous antique kinds, there is no safety for him from L. T. Penner’s invisible reprisals; no man may sleep securely who has sinned against his neighbor; and I feel confident now, as I have never dared to feel before, that our most pious hopes shall be fulfilled, and thanks to Luther Penner, we shall see this unjust comedy of life justly concluded, and the meek come into the legacy that long ago was promised them.

It is my intention here to lead this modest genius gently before the public, and to acquaint it with the doctrines which will one day fasten his name to every soul like a maker’s mark. I have no doubt that when my account reaches print, and when his journals (all of them frank, unfettered, and green as a meadow’s grass) are set in type, Luther Penner will be hailed as another Copernicus, turning our view of the universe around. No one has dreamed as incessantly, as deeply, as madly, as he. Like his famous namesake, Luther would reform us in everything, and surely nothing is more evident than our need for reformation, since even Nature, not to mention Man, has fallen
from its former place in our regard, and now lies smashed in fragments, in a scatter of meaningless shards. From earliest childhood this disagreeable state of affairs had impressed itself on Luther Penner, and through the sight that seems to be given in secret to those destined by the gods for glorious things, he saw into the “dirty persons” of his small companions, as passages in his childhood diaries prove, with a terrifying penetration and clarity, while his commerce with them sounded in his thoughts the first note of his music, an aria of revenge and vindication.

Lest the reader imagine that I am letting my fancy free to infer Penner’s early attitudes from his later and more rounded nature, I shall quote here some of the first scrawly-handed entries to be found in his diaries. He began his records early and continued them until his unfortunate demise. There is an astonishing continuity of content and tone to them over the years, despite the changes of style we might expect, along with Penner’s mounting maturity and enlargement of learning. The late journals of his middle (and last) years are increasingly devoted to philosophical reflections. What Luther Penner always wants to know is “why?” “why?”

Luther was never a strong child, as he was a weak and timorous man, forever saying “I agree,” as he ruefully admits, “undoubtedly,” “of course,” “how clever,” “very true,” “quite nice,” and showing the soft, uneven edges of his teeth in a continuous, shy, abasing grin until his fellows grew suspicious of him and he no longer was appointed to committees or assigned to sections of the major courses but put where there was no one over him to whom he had to play the poodle, and where, at first with difficulty but later with increasing calm and forceful execution, he ruled himself like a lord, turning his soul to steel in his wretchedness, beginning to gather the significant acts of his past together in a pattern which cried its moral aloud; for it was during these days that he remembered, for instance, how, in a playground as a child, he had many times spat vengefully on the slide to moisten the pants of an enemy, or, older, dropped a fly in the soft drink of a burly, overbearing girl, or at the commencement of his teens, dried his aunt’s silverware upon his desocked feet.

Obvious as the principle may seem to us now, Penner did not immediately perceive it, and it was only when he widened his
data with the whole of history, at the end of a life of labor, that the truth was plain; so it was a particularly important moment when, shortly following another recollection of how the silver felt between his toes one sweaty August afternoon (fork tine between toe tine, as his diary reports it), in a book of Italian history, he made the acquaintance of that redoubtable cardinal Ippolito d’Este, a man of singular directness and moral purpose. Learning that his brother Don Giulio was preferred to him by Angela Borgia because that babbling whore admired, as she had imprudently said, the tint and lashes of her Giulio’s eyes more than Ippolito’s very serviceable body, the cardinal pointed to his brother when he chanced to meet him on the road (seeing that his brother rode with pride, in ornament, and was poorly attended), and cried out to his grooms impulsively, “Kill that man, gouge out his eyes.” Important, I say, for on reading this, Penner put his finger to his lips and sucked upon his breath as if a secret were about to be released from his lungs. He describes the occasion vividly in his journal. Then he says, “I suddenly realized that the real distance between the way I chose to dry my Auntie Spatz’s sterling service and the jealous cardinal’s fierce command lay not in what I and Ippolito differently desired, but in what we differently dared.”

Penner’s family was in no way remarkable, and it is difficult to see in it the soil that was to send so great a tree aloft. Penner notes only, in a letter he wrote to me during those sad last days, his father’s habit of swearing constantly under his breath at absolutely everybody, his wife and son in particular, but also at stair treads and stuck doors, the broken points of pencils, dead batteries, bent nails, coffee spills, shirt stains, car horns, newspaper articles, market reports, his son Luther’s frequent colds with their accompanying coughs, sniffles, and whining, cold cuts too (baloney on bread, Spam with spinach), cold coffee, cold days, his slippers on such mornings, and the morning floor.
He had it in for radio commentators especially: Kaltenborn, you caponized cockadoodle, what do you know about machinists? he would say to the radio, his head nonetheless hidden behind his newspaper, as if the announcer might be looking through the Philco at him; what mental illness,
Scheisskopf
, makes you think you know what the workers at Chrysler are going to do? (Penner’s father particularly hated the AFL and the CIO.) These sneaky labor organizers hiss and coil and crawl about because they’re snakes, he’d grumble somewhat redundantly, and will strike at anything in their path. His father would fork his fingers like fangs. Did you call upon your fat
Boche
brains to figure that out, he’d growl at one of Kaltenborn’s pronouncements. Too bad, because, Kalty, your brains are too soft to even rattle. His father’s swearing rarely rose above a mutter, but it was nearly always there, accompanying the damn dumb morning paper, the damn dumb cantaloupe which was difficult to spoon, the damn dumb honey which leaked on his fingers, the damn tough toast which scraped raw the roof of his mouth.