Testimony and Demeanor (12 page)

Honorée said, “When I was two or three, my mother claims, I had a Swedish accent. We went to church for a Christmas pageant and I looked at all the girls dressed up like angels carrying candles and I said, ‘Look, Mama! Dere’s a yady with a yight. And dere’s anudder yady with a yight.’ ” Honorée laughed at her singsong. She said, “I dreamed about that. Except you were there and you could really talk Swedish and that made my mother really happy. Except later on in that dream, or maybe it was another dream, I had to go to a party and everyone but me was speaking in blank verse. Just like
Twelfth Night
. They’d even say a rhymed couplet before they’d exit. It was really awful. But I think I know what that’s about—it was my anxiety about the theater crowd. And
that’s
not a problem anymore. I don’t know why I didn’t have any confidence this fall. I guess I thought there was just one way to be good at things—there was a set of rules, and either you knew or you didn’t. You know, the way Miss Quist just seemed to know what was O.K. and how to do things. But then I saw you just going ahead and being the way you were and talking about the way you thought and not caring about whether that made you popular. And then talking to you by myself, I saw you were completely sincere about the way you were in class. Well, that was one thing I learned—that you don’t need to be heart-broken about anything. Someone will appreciate you. You were so nice about that—well, not really nice, because that
would mean you weren’t sincere about what you think of me.

“And now everything’s just sailing along. Just think. If all this can happen before the first year’s even over, what’ll the next three years be like?”

I had a sudden sense of Honorée’s sensation of her life then—prettily piled-up clouds sailing by on a short spring day.

I went back to my office, where I found my Okie officemate moving his things out. He was embarrassed. “Did you get my note?” he said. “I’m just going down the hall. I’m moving in with the guy that uses a lot of the same books. I left a note in the mailbox; I wasn’t sure you’d be back so early. Your mail’s all there still. This is going to work out better for our schedules—I was always getting in your hair.”

I said something amiable.

He lifted his carton of books and notes with his typewriter perched on top. I asked if I could help carry the typewriter.

“No; thanks anyway.” He said, “Well, I sure won’t miss the view.” We both laughed. The view was of the parking lot. Actually, I rather liked looking down on the parking lot—it was the one place one could see the coming and going of the Easter parade. But I wanted to be polite.

I lost myself in typing, a mindless anthill task. Insect tedium, carrying one grain of sand after another under a sky that was too vast.

I read my office mail when I got home. My feelings were less hurt—my ex-officemate had written a nice note. There was also a Christmas card from Honorée, which she’d mailed before vacation. Santa and his reindeer landing on the roof of a house. She’d written: “At least it’s not an airplane.”

I called her to ask her to come out for supper on Saturday. She said, “Oh,” several times and then said she couldn’t. We both hung up with surprise.

When I picked up the phone a little later to ask her to come Friday instead, two women were talking on the party line.

I heard one speak with what I thought was unnatural
slowness. “Did you get to that sale I told you about before? I got to it right at the end … and I bought …” She listed a dozen things and their prices. The agonizing stretch of speech and pause depressed me. But I didn’t hang up. The other woman spoke, even more slowly than the first. “I got there all right.” She described in detail who had taken her in which car by what roads. She said, “You know what Jim said … when I told him … about buying a new bra? He said, ‘You know what they call them now? They call them over … the … shoulder … boulder … holders.’ ”

There was a long pause and then both women laughed. There was another pause of a slow breath and they laughed again. The second woman repeated the phrase and, after another pause, laughed.

The first woman said, “There’s Jim coming back now. I guess I got to go.”

They fixed a time when they would speak again and finally hung up.

Honorée said she couldn’t come for supper on Friday but she would come out Friday afternoon.

I stepped outside and strolled around the yard.

I remembered my landlord showing me the house, slowly explaining how to take down the screens and put up the storm windows. We went to the basement. Behind the furnace there was a sawhorse, and across it there was balanced a long saw with a handle at either end. My landlord said, “So that’s where that got to. Last time we used that was cutting a fence post on V-J day.”

Now I thought of that saw balancing for twenty slow years.

I looked at the line of road, at the flat ridge along which a tractor moved as slowly as a cloud. The sky was still.

I had an attack of agoraphobia—not just a fear of open space, but of open time, a fear of the slowness of the woman’s comfortable speech, of time expanding until all incident, all definition, and all rhythm were diminished. My thought was of
less importance than my breathing, which, mysteriously, refused the panic in my mind. Breath followed breath, infinitely small fractions of an invisible cloud troubling nothing.

I recovered by Honorée’s visit on Friday afternoon. I’d received a note from Elizabeth Mary Chetty announcing when she was arriving to spend the spring term. The thought of her tropically dense intelligence gave me pleasure. This anticipated pleasure settled me. Honorée came out in a pickup truck she’d borrowed. Because she hadn’t walked out, she said we had to go for a long walk. With her as my guide, the landscape didn’t seem dangerously transient but a simple well-behaved background to her childish prettiness. Honorée’s walking tour took us across the nearest field and into the woods to a stream. On the way across the field, she pointed out rabbit tracks in the snow.

She said, “Look. Here he’s just walking along. And then here he starts to run. See how the two front paws are together and he’s really jumping with his back legs. That’s those long tracks right there. And over there you can see how he zigzagged. And then they end here. If you look right there and there you can see why.”

“Why?”

Honorée pointed to two faint brushings in the snow about a pace apart. “Those are from the wingtips of an owl. Maybe a hawk, but more likely an owl. That little hole in the snow in between the wings is where he got caught. An owl doesn’t just snatch, you know—they open up their claws so they just stick straight in. Their wings open up right at the end of their dive to keep them from crashing. They don’t want to land at all—it’s hard for them to take off from the ground, they’re so big.”

I found this narrative of signs sad, but Honorée was filled with good humor and energy. She bounced around the woods in her gum boots as though she were dancing. She bent a sapling down to the ground and rode it like one end of a seesaw. It didn’t work very well. She dismounted and let the sapling go.

She said, “When I was little, my father would pull over a
green tree like this and I’d go flying right up into the air. My father was the one who got me interested in modern dance.”

I said, “I thought you were a gymnast in high school.”

Honorée said, “Oh—yes; that was the nearest thing to it in that high school. But my father drove us down to the next town for modern dance every Saturday. His only fault was that he thought we were all wonderful. That’s why I couldn’t trust him after a while, because he’d always say I was wonderful no matter what. But it was good to be encouraged, I guess. You remind me of my father some. Except of course you don’t exactly overpraise me—but that’s good. The way you decide something’s good or bad is so definite, so when you finally do decide something’s good it isn’t just because you like some person. And of course it works the other way around too—you could tell me something I’ve done isn’t any good and I wouldn’t be worried that you didn’t like me.”

She gave a tug at the sapling. “I think it’s not really springy enough because it’s winter.”

I thought her appreciation of me was false—rather like a nineteenth-century picture-book version of the Middle Ages. But it didn’t matter for the moment; we were alternating in a pleasant pretty way, as though we were singing two different songs in a round—“Frère Jacques” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

We had tea and watched the sun set. She seemed to have a good idea of how pleased I was by her visit. It made her more articulate; I’d known she had a sense of humor but I hadn’t realized she had a precise, and at times even skeptical, intelligence. She also had a sweetly bossy side—advising me to eat more, to lower the heat in my house so I wouldn’t catch cold from going out overheated.

She suddenly stood up. “Oh, my gosh. I’ve got to be at the theater. We all have to see this Marx Brothers movie together. Oh, they’ll hate it if I’m late.”

I said I’d give her a ride.

She laughed. “I drove myself out.” She said, “Don’t you notice what’s sitting in your own yard?” She pointed out the window to the pickup truck. For some reason my absent-mindedness embarrassed me. Honorée had been about to laugh again, but stopped when she noticed my expression. Her attention embarrassed me more, an embarrassment now absurdly out of proportion to a trivial cause.

I thought Honorée was peering at me, and even seeing for the first time that I had a nervous flaw.

But she said, “Oh. Don’t worry. You don’t have to give me a ride to get your kiss.”

I was surprised by this now perfect misunderstanding. And now Honorée, having surprised herself, blushed up to her eyes. We looked at each other. She was stopped dead, no momentum of teasing to help her. More slowly than I would have ever imagined, she moved upstream against the current of my look. She was still nervous, but solemnly certain of giving pleasure. As she slid her feet forward, she took a shallow breath through her nose that made her head bob. We kissed, and then Honorée relaxed completely, as though her curiosity, her duty, her worry, her expectation, were all lifted up. She leaned on me happily for an instant, as though she was a castaway washed ashore on me by a long wave. It was really her pleasure and trust that touched me. For a short while I thought that was all there was to it, that all I had to be was the shore soothed by the wave.

I slowly worked my way through my piles of blue books and final term papers. I also had to sit on a committee which reviewed a number of the examinations graded by teaching assistants.

At the end of this miserable week I drove to the Cedar Rapids airport to pick up Elizabeth Mary Chetty. The department chairman seemed impressed that I knew her. I felt as though I’d won a prize when she moved in to share my office.

She seemed glad to see me, and soon had me convinced that we were old chums. She was as argumentative as ever, but now that we were suddenly friends I found I even liked her retrospectively. I could now cluck amiably and familiarly at her brilliant wrong-headedness, rather than feel shriveled at the thought of her heresies being rewarded.

Our basic disagreement was this: She regarded criticism as the highest form of creative amalgamation. She wished to swoop down on the wings of theory from her aerie on a timeless mountain and carry off her prey, whose most edible innards she called “structures.” She in her turn regarded me as a worm, writhing around forever in “the period,” munching my way through even the third- and fourth-rank writers, provided they smelled and tasted like “the period.”

We insulted each other merrily. She would say, “Oh, Oliver—you are nothing but an encomiast. You are nothing but an aestheticizer. You wish to preserve the innocence of everything and everybody. If only you could insinuate yourself into the brain of some typical Elizabethan groundling actually seeing a Shakespeare play then and there, you would think you’d found the truth. That is how puny it is to be ‘true to the age.’ ”

And I would say that she loved dangerous ideas just because they were dangerous and that her theories were nothing but jujitsu holds and that she was only happy when an author was at her feet.

I confess that she was more consistent with her simple worm metaphor than I was with my eagle and jujitsu.

She said, “There. Now we both have said the very worst. I feel good enough to go back to work. And please don’t tempt me into chatting when we are in our office together; there it must be work, work, work.”

Within two days of her arrival she was swamped with applicants for her upper-level seminar. She ruthlessly chucked out
all but the brightest. I was impressed with her quick scan of who they were. The next day she invited me along to lunch with two senior members of the department. She was brilliantly chatty. She alluded to their works shamelessly. She took the major theory in one senior colleague’s book and wiggled it like a loose tooth. The colleague whose tooth it was was seized with the sensation which he finally decided was pleasurable.

The next day both senior members showed up for the first lecture of her survey course, giving it an air of grand occasion as they tried to make themselves unobtrusive, settling into the cushioned seats of the lecture hall, their scarves dangling around their necks like albs. The students beside them stuffed their own snow-sogged parkas and field jackets aside, away from the ranking overcoats. The senior presences made soothing gestures with their fingers, meaning don’t mind me, don’t bother, just dropping in.

Several students handed out mimeographed sheets—the reading list, the next twenty lecture topics with keyed reading assignments, and a detailed outline of the day’s lecture.

All these formal details, I saw with some envy, roused the students to a state of nervous attention. Elizabeth Mary didn’t let it lapse. I was surprised at her tone. She wasn’t at all playful now—in fact, she seemed not only totally serious but furious. So furious and concentrated did she seem that it took me a while to realize that she wasn’t going very fast. Quite right for a middle-level survey. This wasn’t a dissection of the nervous system of the work she was discussing—rather a carving of the several large muscles and bones. And she certainly had no trouble finding the joints.