Old Men at Midnight (18 page)

“Did you?”

“An eagle’s language, a scorpion’s bite, if I may say so. You depict a unique hell.”

“We live in a strange time. A different hell is called for, most definitely, wouldn’t you say?”

“Aren’t you standing in a very muddy lawn?”

“Oh, I don’t mind the mud. Actually, I’m watching the fireflies.”

The lawn was ablaze with the tiny low-flying creatures, lending the dark air the appearance of a star-sprinkled sky.

“Light without heat,” he heard her say. “Since early childhood, fascinated by fireflies. Did you deliver a talk in Chicago?”

“On the Persian Gulf War.”

“Ah, of course, the Professor of War discoursing on war. You must tell me what you said. Did you use anecdotes in your talk?”

“Davita, it’s quite late.”

“Like all writers, I am eager for good stories.”

“I teach tomorrow.”

“I didn’t mean right now. Over coffee, one day soon?”

“It will be my pleasure.”

“Good night, Benjamin.”

He went along the side of the house and the flagstone front walk to the porch. Climbing the three steps, he looked briefly to his left and saw across the lawn the vague
globe of her head still suspended in the darkness near the hedge.

Inside, the nurse sat waiting. They talked briefly about the day—Evelyn’s progress, her response to the medications, her frame of mind—and the nurse then slipped quietly out of the house with a murmured good night. He turned off the lamps, leaving only the night-light burning, a faint greenish glow near the foot of the stairs. The house, once resonating with the buoyant mayhem of children, now sepulchral with silence. Slowly, he climbed the well of carpeted stairs.

A wedge of yellow light from their room spilled onto the dim second-floor hallway. He entered the room, set down the bags. She opened her eyes.

“Benjamin.” An effort, her whisper.

“My dear,” he said softly.

The pneumonia was deep this time, exhausting, but still treatable at home. Large shadow-rimmed gray eyes in a thin long face drawn pale and tight across the temples and cheekbones. The warm acrid odor of her sweat.

“Is there anything I can get you?”

She replied tonelessly, “Dear Benjamin, how about a dill-and-yogurt soup?”

He lowered his head.

“Don’t forget to add a generous grinding of pepper.” Her voice matter-of-fact, a near-whisper. “And veal alla marsala. Again, don’t forget the pepper.”

“My dear—”

“Rice Creole, once again the pepper. And ratatouille.”

“Dear—”

“Shall I have a salad? Perhaps a string bean salad with vinaigrette?”

“Dear, dear Evelyn,” he murmured.

“It is all still very astonishing,” she said, and closed her eyes and turned her face to the wall.

She lay very still, breathing with difficulty. He turned off the light and stood gazing into the deep blues and purples of the darkened room. The partly open windows faced the rear of the house and he distinctly heard the trees: the oaks and pines, the cedars and elms.

Arms and legs throbbing, he undressed and slipped into pajamas. Skeletal underpinning slowly but irreversibly splintering and fracturing; Humpty-Dumpty in slow motion. In the bathroom he washed and took his medications and gazed at himself in the medicine-cabinet mirror. Not yet the ravaged midnight features of W. H. Auden. He thought of the face of I. D. Chandal. The two faces, the one on the lawn and the other in the book. It occurred to him that his wife’s library must have old hardback copies of works by I. D. Chandal, and he went quietly through the bedroom and crossed the hall into her study. Undisturbed the past two weeks, the air inside musty. Six novels by I. D. Chandal, and two short-story collections. He found her photograph on the back of only one of the books, a novel four years old. The same photograph as the one on the book he had purchased in Chicago—and which, he now realized with dismay, he had forgotten on the airplane! Annoyed over that. He put back on the shelf the novel with
the photograph and, as he turned to leave, glanced out the study window, which faced the side of the Tudor, and noticed a ground-floor room, the kitchen, earlier dark, now lit. At a table sat a woman, her face concealed by her hand. The rhododendron hedge did not extend that far down the length of the lawn, and he was able to see clearly her pale-blue nightdress and portly form and graying hair.

Fatigued now beyond easy measure, and the sleeping pill he had earlier swallowed beginning to take hold, he returned to the bedroom. Cool sheets, moonlight on the windows, the trees murmurous. Evelyn breathing steadily. She’ll wake at least once. From the woods the hooting of an owl and before his aching eyes the sudden image of the picked-clean skeleton of a squirrel on the front walk one morning. The children gaping at it, shrinking back, fascinated, horrified. Tiny, delicate, glistening bones: spinal column, feet, all neatly splayed, as if pinned for dissection. Owls do that, he said, pick you clean to the core. Evelyn said, No, dear, that was not an owl, owls eat everything, even the bones, and if it’s eating a bird it will leave only the feathers. More likely the work of our neighbor’s cat, she added in that wondrously amiable way she had of imparting knowledge without the least display of conceit; the Tudor people’d had a white tabby in those days. He scooped up the skeleton of the squirrel with a shovel and tossed it into the garbage bin near the garage, the children watching, shocked, unnerved. Were they thinking: Will this happen to us too, one day reduced this way to bone? Should’ve talked to them about it afterward but they went
off to school and the incident was never brought up and why was he remembering it now, oh, yes, the owl. He thought, woozy from the medication: How tedious and commonplace, this business of mortality. Infrequently considered, and when considered, too quickly put aside. What returns it to remembrance is irony. A war trench repeatedly shelled is soon lost to recollection. But bomb a sleepy town—the irony will nail it solidly to memory. There, the owl again, from the woods or the cemetery. Oh, yes, an explosive device ravaging an innocent airliner is the very guarantor of memory. Is that the reason we remember forever the biblical Amalekites who attacked Israelites during the exodus from Egypt? The assault upon helpless, fleeing people a bitter irony. What would that strange man, the trope—cantillation—teacher, have said to that? The trope teacher! Why have I suddenly recalled the trope teacher? A quickening beat of the heart in the swiftly gathering clouds of sleep.

His wife woke him later that night, and he went to her. Feverish again and soaked with sweat. Gently, he raised her, dried her with a towel, helped her into a fresh nightgown. He murmured to her reassuringly: she would come out of this as she had before. She coughed and belched. He helped her to the bathroom and supported her so she would not tumble off the toilet. She lay on his bed as he changed her sheets.

“Actually, dear, I would prefer lunch in Davy Byrne’s with Leopold Bloom,” she said.

He laughed softly.

She murmured, as he helped her into her bed, “One can hardly believe that one’s own body could become such an awful enemy.”

She fell asleep.

He remained starkly awake and after a while went to the bathroom for another sleeping pill. But he decided not to take it; the aftereffect would smother him in a wooly blanket of exhaustion that would linger into the morning and he had a full day awaiting him at the university. Spend an hour or so now working on the memoirs, fall asleep over that.

He entered his study and, looking out the window at the Tudor, saw I. D. Chandal in her kitchen, yellow-lit, framed by the window, obese. All the rest of the Tudor had melted into the darkness. She sat hunched over a pad, writing. He watched until he grew sleepy and then returned to his bed.

The nurse arrived punctually, as always, in the early morning. A hot, cloudy day, more storms predicted. His wife was still asleep when he left the house. The oaks behind the house, silent. And hushed, too, the woods.

He went along the driveway toward the garage and saw I. D. Chandal, shovel in hand, bent over a wide length of raw earth she had dug from the end of the hedge to the border of the woods. Her blond hair was covered with a bright-yellow bandana. Firm breasts, shapely hips. A dizziness came over him.

She said, straightening, “Good morning, Benjamin. It will storm again today.”

He was fighting off the sensation of being slightly unhinged.

“Benjamin?”

A pause. Two or three deep breaths. Then, “Good morning. You’re up early.”

“A wonderful day to plant. Earth soft from yesterday’s rain, and put the flowers in before the next rain.”

He climbed into the Saab.

She said, “How is your wife?”

He closed the car door, rolled down the window, and started the engine. “My wife had a bad night.”

She raised toward him slightly the hand that grasped the earth-encrusted shovel: a gesture of sympathy.

“Davita,” he said through the open window of the car. “Your ram in the bush?”

“Yes?”

“Where is it?”

She gazed at him without expression.

He moved the car along and glanced at her in his rearview mirror. She stood, shovel in hand, watching him turn onto the street. Even from that distance he could see clearly the look of ferocity on her face.

He drove cautiously along the winding country roads and the curving corrugated parkway, sticking always to the right lane, watching out for the potholes, aware of the cars in the center and left lanes racing past him. On both sides of the parkway tall trees with infant
leaves silhouetted against the cloudy sky. Broken patches of road jarring the steering wheel and his fingers and hands. The upper deck of the bridge nearly lost in a yellow fog and the wide river dull gray and running into mist and the city endlessly bleak beneath a blockade of low, dense clouds. Tiresome this drive. Still, the Max Weber Chair in Sociology sufficient reason to have moved here. But to live in the city—unthinkable. Yet the travel time. And Evelyn’s commute to Princeton. And the costly private schools for the children. Poor choice in the end? Maybe. Hindsight always the winner in the war of wits. Hardly the streets of Oxford and the bike rides to Balliol. Destitute England like a wheezing invalid then, my mother secretly sending the food packages, my father utterly mute. That old bike with the basket in front and the dead metallic sound of its warning bell. Riding down the road and turning left and passing the playing fields of Magdalen. Cool sweet-scented air and flowers spilling over onto the sidewalks, houses pink in the early light and the gravel path to the residential street and on into the park with the broad fields and the cricket matches on Saturdays. And just inside the entrance to the park the tall thick-trunked tree with the haven of greenish shadows beneath its branches. How I loved that tree. And flowers lining the gravel path and the river running narrow and slow to my left along the water walks until it opened out into the wide water where Evelyn taught me to punt. Trees green and dense along the banks and the shadows of leaves on the dark mirror surface of the water. Putting the pole in, feeling it slide into the muddy bottom, pushing,
punting. And Evelyn reading aloud from Auden about seas of pity lying locked and frozen. Why am I suddenly remembering
that
? Seas of pity locked and frozen. She taught me a great deal, my Evelyn: how to truly read and write, how to blissfully forget. And the gravel path led to the road that ran past the museum and the Bodleian and the pub and into Broad Street and Balliol, the quadrangle, the stone archway, the dining hall, the dorm rooms, the open green with the garden outside the chapel, and trees, lovely trees. Evelyn on her bike; long russet hair trailing in the wind. Color on her high-boned flushed cheeks and sweat on her face even in winter and the musky smell of the sweat between her breasts and under her arms. And the perpetual look of surprise in her eyes; surprise that she and her parents and her two brothers had survived the war; surprise that she had gone from nursing soldiers to reading literature; surprise that she had fallen in love with a Yank, an ailing Yank, a Jewish Yank, she being vintage Church of England stock and a descendant of William of Waynflete, who had been Bishop of Manchester, a loyal minister of Henry VI, and founder of Magdalen College. True, I wore a different face then: lank and pallid from the illness and not a little apprehensive, but handsome, and eyes glittering with a hunger to take in the world. And the infinite wonder each time the seeming fragile thinness of her would turn fiery and tumescent during the turbulence of sex.

The car lurched and plunged and climbed through a dip in the cobblestone street. Europe cobbled with the bones of war dead. Where did I read that? So tired this morning.
All that anger in Chicago, exhausting. Is that rain? No, street grit on the windshield. His eyes swollen with fatigue; his fingers tight on the wheel, aching.

He steered the Saab into the side-street garage and left it with an attendant. Umbrella in one hand and briefcase in the other; he had a gangly, flat-footed walk. Dark homburg and charcoal-gray suit; starched white shirt and icy yellow tie. Curious glances from the jeans and T-shirt crowd. Evelyn tells me that I bring to mind T. S. Eliot walking to his bank. Big fuss in academe now over Eliot’s wretched anti-Semitism. Suddenly discovered America, as my father would say.

He took one of the pedestrian paths into College Walk.

The paved center lane was crowded with cars. Water splashing in the fountains of the plaza. Steps thronged with students. The sunless air strangely still; the flags drooping on their tall poles. Security guards: alert for the rites and tumults of spring? Posters announcing meetings, films, plays, demonstrations. Gays. Lesbians. Afro-Americans. Asians. Women’s rights. Pro-Lifers. America Balkanized.
E pluribus plura
. What is this? A colloquium on Heidegger. Repellent philosophy from a damnable man. And another on Derrida. That too shall pass. All this academic cacophony, with the city as backdrop. Beginning to rain.

He rode the elevator up to his office and some while later sat before a microphone lecturing to nearly one hundred students in a large, stuffy hall whose open windows seemed to suck in the noises of the cars, buses, trucks, and pedestrians on the four-lane street. A steady background of
sound during the fifty minutes of the class. Some of the students slept. One kept rolling his head: probably on drugs.