Something in the Shadows (7 page)

Disorder.

The word flashed through Joseph Meaker’s mind the second he stepped inside the doctor’s office; one quick look around licked the label, stamped it across the room.

“Joe, Joe, glad you dropped in.”

“I should have phoned.”

“No, the hell with formalities. What can I do for you?”

“I brought my driver’s certificate.”

“Aha! Sure, we can do that for you, Joe.”

Louis sat down at his small roll-top desk in the corner, his back to Joseph, fussing through papers, humming to himself. Disorder everywhere. A stethoscope flung on a chair, needles nesting in a towel on the window sill, an empty bottle of iodine overturned on a cabinet top, a pair of rubbers scattered about on the floor with an umbrella, and near the door a stack of old magazines.

Joseph was neat. Maggie said he had “a thing” about being neat. Cats were neat too. Dogs would step in their own dirt and keep right on going, oblivious to it, but a cat who had such an accident shook its leg irritably, walked, stopped, shook it again — nine times out of ten, cleaned herself. Joseph had always respected cats for their neatness. He had always been careful about Ishmael’s pan, not to let it stay dirty, and Ishmael knew and appreciated. The moment Joseph would dump the pan, and rattle the bag with the fresh litter, that cat would come running from wherever she was.

“I was wondering when I’d see you again, Joe.”

“It’s been a busy time.” The trick was to act matter-of-fact; let Louis Hart look back on this moment and remember how cool Joseph had been. Joseph told of his visit to the cloisters in Ephrata, last Monday. A man named Beissel had founded a religious order there in a quest for solitude, for flagellation of the spirit. What Joseph saw as Cocalico Creek, where the settlement began, was once the snake-infested Kock-Halekung, a barren and dangerous spot where Beissel took up his life of self-attrition. Joseph had been deeply moved by his visit there, but he kept emotion from his voice, and recited the details of his visit in a mundane fashion. In his Journal at home, he had written: “Beissel’s loneliness is my own. I too will escape one day, so far into myself that I will be free of self; isn’t that what Beissel meant?”

“Ah, yes, Ephrata!” said Hart, nodding his head with a nostalgic air, as though he were every bit as involved in the cloisters as Joseph. Joseph hated him for that. He wanted to sneer at Hart, ask Hart what
he
knew about it.

Instead he simply said, “I saw some interesting petit point in Lancaster County too. Much of it harking back to the French Huguenots’ influence.” Joseph had in mind a particular embroidery, with the distelfink woven in, and the roses and lilies surrounding the red and goldish ecru legend from Psalms:
“By this I know that thou favourest me because mine enemy doth not triumph over me.”

“I’ve always thought Beissel had the answer,” Louis said.

“I imagined
you’d
think he was crazy,” Joseph said with a small smile of contempt. If Louis noticed it, he seemed unaffected.

He said, “Let’s hear the old ticker, Joe. Undo your shirt.”

Joseph was glad Hart had called him Joe. It was a name as unfamiliar to Joseph as some stranger’s, and he was glad Hart could not achieve an intimacy even in the little way of using his first name.

Joseph’s heart began to pound as he undid his shirt Sometimes when he was reading late at night in his study, with the house quiet, he would hear his heart in this same way. It made him feel as though his own self were standing over him, regarding him, deciding about him; his own self who knew him best, better than Joseph knew himself. For a second while Louis pressed the ear of the stethoscope into Joseph’s flesh, Joseph had the thought that now his self and Louis Hart were working together, listening not to his heartbeat, but to those inner thoughts even Joseph never heard. It was a nervous second’s sensation which made Joseph flinch momentarily, prompting Hart to say, “Steady;” then Joseph heard his heart race faster, thumping and protesting. It was his self rebelling at the intimacy with such a man;
that
was it.

“Racing a bit. You nervous, Joe?”

“I’ve been working very hard.” The lie came easily. It was a wonder to Joseph. He had never been able to lie, not even in a matter of no consequence; yet there it was, spoken without a tremor. Since he had visited the Ephrata cloisters, he had not translated one note into so much as a paragraph. Usually he was quick to record his impressions, but the room he worked in was too great a reminder of Ishmael, and though he had tried to set up his work on the kitchen table, his reason for being displaced that way carried him off into a fit of brooding.

Maggie never realized what was happening to him, not really. His preliminary paper on the “German Sectarians of Provincial Pennsylvania” had gone so rapidly that Maggie had suggested he keep it a few weeks before submitting it. Maggie had an idea people did not respect the fast worker; sometimes Maggie dragged out an idea for weeks, wrote up dozens of little memos before the coup. Joseph had ignored the suggestion, but when he won the grant for this new study, Maggie said her strategy had paid off. “Take it easy with this new project, too,” Maggie had said, “All the early bird ever
does
is get the worm!” For Maggie there was no end, no means: the strategy justified the strategy. If Joseph was not working lately, Maggie undoubtedly imagined it was strategy.

Louis was winding up the stethoscope into a ball, pushing it aside on his desk. He was murmuring to himself as he looked over the card. “Let’s see, not a narcotic addict, not an uncontrolled diabetic, not an uncontrolled epileptic, not an — ”

Not a killer either, Joseph felt like saying.

“I can skip the urinalysis, hah? This is just so much red tape.” Louis scribbled his signature at the bottom. “If you drank, I’d offer you a whisky. I’m about finished today.”

“I haven’t anything to let loose,” said Joseph.

“Hmm?”

“People who drink usually have something to let loose. I don’t have.”

“Oh? Well, okay then, Joe.” Hart handed him the form. “That’s it.”

“Thank you.” Joseph had left the gift of the book on the chair by the door, in a plain paper bag. He got up to get it, stumbling into the pile of magazines.

“My past,” Louis said. “I’m a miser. I hoard the past. These are
Life’s
from 1948.” Louis leaned over and picked up one of the magazines, slapped it across his desk top. “I sit here and go over them.” He sighed. “Nineteen forty-eight’s my favourite year. Lots of progress. Chicago hotels got Gideon Bibles with alcohol-proof covers in 1948.”

“I remember that year very well,” said Joseph.

“People were singing ‘Nature Boy’ and reading Dr. Kinsey. Gandhi was assassinated, and the Department of Commerce instigated National Laugh Week.”

“I was still in college,” Joseph Meaker said.

“… and my dear, I love your soul — profound, sad, wise and exalted, like a symphony.”

“What do you remember?” said Louis.

He remembered 3 May, 1948, standing on the Boone County Courthouse lawn. The sun is hot, but it is not a hot day. Spring in Missouri.

Signs:

Beside him a farmer is holding a coke bottle, empty, holding it back by his shoulder. Coca-Cola. Joseph stares at the word. Coca hyphen Cola. He has never noticed the hyphen before. He knows what the farmer is going to do. He could reach out with his own hand and wrestle with the farmer for the bottle, prevent him from throwing it, but he is loath to involve himself. There would be a fight. There will be one anyway; that’s right, and he is wearing clean clothes. He wants to leave. In the stacks of the library this very moment there are other students studying in the neat cubicles, row on row of them, like monks; sheltered, protected by the shelves of books. His own books are there in the cubicle reserved for him, five, six, seven, neatly arranged on top the metal desk; and in the drawer, sharp pencils, fresh paper, waiting there as faithfully as any cat or dog waiting for the master. He wishes he were there with them. He stares at the white hyphen wishing this. Coca hyphen. Then the hyphen sails up, disappears; there is a fist in its place now, and around Joseph, more fists, like spears on all sides. Now chanting:

Singing follows:

On the platform Henry Wallace tries to shout above the noise; behind him the Negro woman speaker stands straighter, holds her head higher, her glasses glinting in the sunlight.

Joseph recognizes the tune. At the boardinghouse where he lives an Indian student sings at “she doo fat for me, she doo fat for me.” Beside Joseph the farmer cries, “Go back to Russia.”

Students to the left of Joseph chorus, “What about Russia?”

Henry Wallace tries to answer, “I admit I could not get free speech in Russia. I say to you who are denying it to me here — ”

A chorus of boos, jeers. Joseph is pushed backward suddenly by the crowd’s boisterous movement. Someone has stepped on his shoe, a heel of dust insults the high shine. (“Don’t be afraid to get involved, Joseph, because you are already involved; all mankind is involved in the people’s struggle. You must just face it” — lying in bed beside her last night, she had said that.)

A vendor selling lemonade is knocked against a tree. The lemonade spills on his white uniform. Joseph can feel its stickiness just as though it were his own clothes soiled. Joseph knows how it smells right now in the library, the green odour of the liquid used for mopping the floors, balanced with the musty smell of the L-M books near his cubicle, and the faint aroma of Vicks Vapo-Rub which Clarence Somerville in the cubicle behind Joseph puts in his nose for his year-round cold. (“I hate violence! In the war I was a C.O., Varda! Because I hate violence!” The bedsprings creaked; she leaned over to get a cigarette, lighted it; the smoke spiralled up between them in the darkness. “Put your hatred to use in a good way, or it will choke you, Joseph. One day it will get out of its big bottle, and you won’t be able to control it then.”)

Suddenly a tall girl with hair yellow like Varda’s and eyes deep blue and fierce, rips at the neck of the man in front of her. “Rubble!” she screams. “Scum! This is a democracy!” Blood trickles at his hairline, down to the dirty collar, while surprise and shock stuns him only for an instant, before he grabs her blouse with his large hand, tears at it while she digs her nails into his face. Students pull her back, and others hold him by his arms. “Rubble! Scum!” she yells, and her blouse is open in front, her breasts thinly covered by the nylon bra. The man being held laughs, a leer cuts across his face, and in a sudden lurching that takes all his strength, he wrenches free, pulls the bra, catching her in a quick jerk that brings a wide-eyed cry from her. He steps back, laughing. The girl covers herself. An angry young man comes forward swinging his fists, and is met by opposition.

“She started it!”

“Let me kill him!”

“Kill you, college boy!”

“Dirty — bastard! I could — ”

Joseph looks for a break in the crowd. On the platform the Negro woman is speaking. A tomato hits the podium. Jeers. Chants. Men with dirt-encrusted wrinkles, eyes narrowed from squinting; boys with peach-fuzz new beards carrying books, girls in skirts and sweaters oohing, ahhing, milling together restlessly; and on the courthouse roof a grinning skinny boy holding up a hammer and sickle. Joseph finds space to move, starts his way back through the crowd. (“Don’t leave me yet, Joseph,” she had said last night.) Someone with a cigarette bumps against him, knocking the cigarette’s ash on Joseph’s light-blue wool V-neck sweater. He smells the burn, rubs it out with his thumb. A woman hisses at the Negro speaker, the spray of her anger falls on Joseph’s cheek; he rubs that out too, as though it were a leech fastening itself to him. When he can run, he does. He does not look back for Varda. He knows she is standing in the back with the other workers, passing the collection box among the rabble.

Later in his cubicle he hears Clarence Somerville behind him, blowing his nose. There is peace in the sound; music nearly. A contentment envelopes him; dust of old books in L-M dance in the dying rays of late afternoon sun. Joseph thinks a poem in his head:

Let my own music to the clouded mountains lure me,

Past festered sores that stare in mortal grin …

He scribbles his poem on a piece of scrap paper, knowing he will never finish it; it is all he cares to say. It is not so much that he was afraid back there at that rally; it is that he could not see himself in anyone there. That was it!
That
was it! He feels better now and works until the library closes.

• • •

“So you just walked out on it,” she says that night. She is carrying her shoes. She has sneaked up the stairs of the boardinghouse for their date. “I know it was awful for you.”

He does not want to talk it out with her. He reaches for her and brings her to his lap on the bed, kisses her face. Kisses away crumpled papers on the courthouse lawn, crushed paper cups, the crowd exercising its ugly democratic right: kisses away older memories, her brother murdered in Pest by Nazis, barbed wire world of her youth; Jew-girl taunts; forget it, Varda, now let me touch you; he feels a tenderness breaking his heart open, spilling a gentle desire all through him for her — then she holds him back.

“You went to the library, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“You’re so weak, Joseph.”

“I hated it there.”

“That word again. Hate.”

“Didn’t you hate it there? What they did to that Negro woman! And I saw a girl whose blouse was ripped by — ”