Extreme Magic (18 page)

“I know,” she said. “You just go—for the fish.”

“Ah, come on now.”

“The way you go almost anywhere,” she said crossly. “Wonder you stay in business.” At once she was contrite, but too nice to say so. “I mean—” She knew he didn’t need money, and why. “Never you mind,” she said quickly. “Go on and do what you like to do, why not. And
be
grandmother to the rest of us. We can use it, all right, all right…Well, good-by, Guy m’love, and thanks.”

“Good-by, Poll.” There came the final, impossible silence in which he waited for her to hang up, and she didn’t.

“Fancy,” she said, very soft for her. “And you were only there once…Well. See you sometime. Cheerio.”

“Tell you what, Poll,” he said desperately. “On your way up there, why not stop by for—lunch. I’ll gather in some people. Or better still—on your way back, then we can have a gas about it.”

“Right,” she said promptly. “Let you know. Or if not, you drop down here. Oh, no fear, I remember what you said about weekends. For the day. I’ll—gather some people.” One more pause. “Good-by, you bloody old fisherman, you,” she said very rapidly, and rang off.

During his two years in the first-class establishment—its rolling golflands not thirty miles from here—into which relatives and the company had been able to put him on all that money (at a yearly maintaining fee of twice his former salary, and in the company of others similarly able to be as expensively aberrant or agonized) he had been led through the gentle craft world of the sanitarium, toward its own necessary fantasy of the goodness and wholeness entirely residual in the world. In that selective company of Wall Street alcoholics, matrons at the climacteric, schizophrenic young nymphs in riding habit, and highly placed failures of the barbiturate, even the other patients had been extra gentle with him, often—as the doctors were quick to see and use—extra reachable by him.

At first he had been in no condition to notice this. Later on, under the constant encouragement from above to help one another, he hadn’t questioned it. Sitting alongside one of the “Park Avenue” matrons, whose hair had been freshly hyacinthed in the on-grounds salon that morning, he and she had learned how to French-polish furniture; on leaving she had sent him—from an address that wasn’t Park but at another altitude he hadn’t yet been aware of—a box of the books on furniture and china which were still the best he owned. The exquisite young rider
—
who dressed to the nines at every hour of the day, was mortally afraid of men at less than a yard’s distance, and always had an animal beside her—had been willing to dismount from her horse, leave her Doberman behind, and walk with him—he had taken it to be because as a man he was still so nullified. The flycaster had taught him golf also, and like a legendary rich uncle turned up in a poor young man’s thirties, had opened to him, in the wistful after-dinner talk of a drinker on cure, a whole Barmecide’s feast of bon vivant living; this man, now lapsed between bed and occasional club window, Callendar still visited, and unlike the man’s own nephews, was received. He understood why now of course, long since grown used to that special kindness which in the hospital he had taken for the good manners the rich had been bred to even in their own sickness, awarded even to him who could teach them nothing, not even—as in the one try which had given him a setback—a knowledge of insurance. Only on leaving had he understood what he was to them, to anyone. Against their ills, mostly fugitive from the world, casualties from within, his case had the ghastly health of the man whose coup de grace had come from life itself, from outside. Against his accident, they still had hands to cross themselves. He was their extreme, the triple amputee at the sight of whom even the single-legged may still take heart.

The phone rang.

“Is this the
eminent,
the resourceful—”

“Hello, Quent.” He prepared to laugh with Quentin Paterno, to join in with the preliminary conversation tic, a stutter of courage rather than larynx, with which his earliest customer-friend always had to start.

“Spoils
port! Now I’ll have to begin all over.” He could hear the little man clear his throat, see the pudge of fist kneading potbelly, the bright brown eyes straining under nobly bald brow.

“Is this the powerful
schattchen,
goodman extraordinary—?”

“I dunno, Quent. What’s that?”

“Marriage broker, you Christian.” Joke. So was Quentin. “Yop, you did it again, matchmaker. And I suppose you’ll say without even knowing it, like always.”

“Ah, come on now.” Because he thought about people a lot generally, those introduced by him—anywhere from dinner guests, to the fellow who’d had a letter from him to a dealer-correspondent in the Rome where Callendar had never been himself, and had married her—almost always clicked, and sometimes paired off.

“It’s just like any statistics, Quent,” he said. “Nobody remembers the ones that don’t come off.”

“Well, this one did. The party was last night. I suppose they didn’t even call you, those young ingrates.”

“No. But I can’t think who.” He shouldn’t have said that. Quent might take it to mean, who in
Quent’s
crowd? It was hard to think of them without the italic in which they thought of themselves.

“Cast your mind back, in fact
turn
back, O Callendar.” No offense given then, except, in that painful laugh at his own joke, by Quent to Quent, who hurried on with the doomed rapidity of a man who had absolute pitch for the way he was sounding. “To a freezing night a nice guy, a
Guy,
is nice enough to come all the way in to hear my concert. A fall guy, in fact, for anyone his broken-down friends writes a play, paints a pitcher.”

“Quent. Give.” If he was a faithful, even grateful audience, always using the tickets, not just buying them, he’d learned not to dwell on the fact that he was always audience.

“Sorry.” If stopped in time, Quent could tune his delicate pitch to others. Exerted, it at once eased him. “After the concert, Guy. Carnegie Taproom. Remember our kid harpist, Violet? The one the orchestra boys were teasing? ‘Nobody-violates-me Violet,’ they call her. And the couple you bumped into at intermission, they run a shop in an old mill down in Bucks somewhere.”

“New Hope,” he said. “Joe and Milly Pink.” The stuff they sold was terrible.

“They had a son with them, a Princeton boy.”

He barely remembered a boy who sat back, who should have been with the younger crowd. Yes, now. The Princeton boy, day boy probably, scholarship surely, who sat well back from all of them, most of all from his all-wrong parents, the mother in squaw blouse and skirt and no bridgework, the father wearing a huge free-form silver ring of his own design. “Yes, I remember now.” And the shy girl, from Oberlin, Ohio. Farm girl probably, or—if they had them out there—a townie. Who sat back. He had gone over and introduced them.

“Those two,” said Quent. “That boy, that girl.”

“Why, that’s fine!” he said. “They—they should do well together.”

“Yeah, you have a fatality. Or a green thumb. And I have a headache. From the party.”

“Nice of you to call me, anyway,” he said. And waited.

“Matter-of-fact—” Quent said. “I’m in the slough, slow, sloo—of despond. Or how do you pronounce it.”

“I dunno. If that’s what you called me for.” A pause.

“Tell me,” said Quentin. “You heard of people named Benjamin? Must be near neighbors of yours.”

“Two doors down,” said Guy, grinning. “And a half a mile away. Yes, I’ve heard of them. They own the house between us too, but keep it empty. A sort of buffer state between them and a commercial.”

“Not now they don’t. They got the grandmother in it, Phoebe Jasper Aldrich. The Aldrich Chamber Concert Mrs. Aldrich. Library of Congress, and points west. You wouldn’t know.”

“I read the papers.”

“Then you know. They blow a horn in heaven, she hired the hall. Lucky the composer gets to feed at that trough. Trow. Troo. Give her credit, most the good ones do get.”

“Oh?” he said, puzzled. Quent, rich enough by inheritance to own the house in Turtle Bay for which he kept Guy still buying, was too proud-poor in another ever to ask this kind of favor. “No—I’m afraid I don’t know them.”

“Don’t anticipate, guileful Guy. I
been
asked. A little late in life, it’s true. To make music in that celestial company. This coming weekend.” When the mock accent dropped, then they were near.

He picked it up. “So?” And waited. It came as expected.

“William.”

As usual.

“How?” he said, finally.

“Pills…Oh, he’s all right. Resting quiet. We got to him.”

As usual.

“I knew in my bones last night, when he wouldn’t go with me. Always a sign, when he won’t leave the house. But I felt I had to go. It’s such a bind, you’re not supposed to show worry. Y’know?”

“Mmm.” He knew.

“You have to be tough with them,” said poor Quentin. “Especially when you’re
family.”

For this he had no answer. “He wasn’t asked up here?” he said. “To go with you.”

“Oh, nothing
personal,”
Quentin said quickly. “Nobody gets to bring anybody up there. Not even
wives.
I told him. But he wouldn’t believe me. You know William.”

“Yes.” Yes, he knew William. A swag of still true-blond hair over the high, narrow cranium of an underfed child—of which William had been one. A mouth set like a cherry pit in the slender jaw. And a nameless talent, or only the desire for one, harbored like a wound. William, barbiturate failure, still only a year away from true boy when first met.

“Yes, I know William.” He had been the patient to whom Guy had tried to teach insurance. “Quent—” If I came down to stay—would he let you go? He already knew the answer, which would be given even now with pride: No. Only me. “No,” he said aloud, “I don’t suppose.”

“Well anyway, that’s really why I called you. To get a line on them. I had some wild idea, maybe she would ask him up. But I can see now how ridiculous.” Quentin expelled a long, relieved sigh.

“No, I don’t know a thing, I’ve never seen them. Except that they have cats.” One was nosing the screen door now.

“Give me that high-class excuse of yours,” Quent said suddenly. “The one
you
use to beg off weekends with. You know. The one you give
us.”

He laughed, and gave it. “I say I like to be alone too much. Then they say ‘Oh, we’ll leave you alone!’ Then I say the simple truth, that I know they will, but I never can hit the right posture for it. I don’t know how to relax into being half-alone but not alone…Mightn’t do for you.”

“Jees, no, you know
me.
No posture at all. No, it has to be something
real.”

“Like what?” he said.

“Claustrophobia, maybe.” Quent was feeling better. “Or what’s that thing on heights?”

“Acrophobia.” It was hard to stay angry with them—if they had to make catastrophe of some small emphatic of life, in the end they always entertained you with their elaboration of it. “But the house is on the riverbank—I know that much. And she’s asking you for the weekend, not burying you.” A second cat was nosing at his door. “Why not ‘Ailurophobe’?” he said. “They must have half a dozen of them. Cats.”

“Cats give
William
asthma,” Quentin said dreamily. “Gee, whad you do, swallow the manual? I wish I could read. I wish I had your sense of detachment.”

Burn your house down then. Burn
William.
It was the one thing for which he couldn’t bear to be marveled at—why should they want his priceless capital of non-suffering? He didn’t answer.

“Anyway, thanks, Guy, maybe I’ll do that. Thanks a million. It’s just—I don’t want it to sound phony. You know? And with certain people, outside your own close circle of friends, howya going to know you not giving offense?” Quent’s voice squeaked—a mouse transfixed in terror of its own moves.

“You don’t give it, Quent,” he said. “You never do.”

“Ah, Guy…Anyway. Good to talk to you. Marriage broker is nothing; you could open a whole accommodation agency. But not till you help us finish on the house, hah?”

That house would never be finished—how could they afford to finish this construct that formally provided them with everyone else’s troubles—and pleasures of course—from maid trouble to gourmet shopping, to spats over the discipline of the curly-headed dog-child? He didn’t say this either.

“Anyway, good-by now,” said Quent. “And William always asks for you. I’ll give your love to William.”

“Yes, do that.”

“And good to talk to you. I’ll be honest with you, that’s why I called.” Quent’s repetitions were more for his own ear than for others—it was the way he knew he meant something. “Thanks again,” he said. “You don’t know what it means to me, to be able to talk to another normal person.”

He put down the phone. Phone calls often made him think of lantern slides, the kind even the high schools probably didn’t use anymore, and views of life, not Borneo. Any housewife might go through a box of them heavy enough to make her hand tremble, any morning. He took up the lamp again.

In the past seven years, he had fulfilled all the fine dreams the hospital had had for him, meanwhile never hiding from himself that these might be limited dreams. It was only now and then that the old fire lit in his head—or the dream of a new one to which he would get there on time. Life, though so much more gently, had still come to him by accident. It had been on his first fishing trip alone, driving back on the Vermont side, that his attention had been caught by a farmhouse flying two flags, British and American, and idly inquiring down the road where he’d stopped to refuel at a gas pump in front of a china-stuffed façade and further sheds receding, had been given the whole of that rum-running story. He had knelt to look at, not buy, an old lamp of a kind he hadn’t seen since and now knew to be as rare as pemmican—and had been given the history of such lamps. History, he found, could be picked like daisies all along the roadside, if one were willing to take it a little squeegee—what had fascinated him from the first was the squeegee—the narrators themselves. And in the end, just like them, he’d acquired a business, and one just like theirs, “on the side.”