But he tried to set things back to the ordinary, crabbed as it was. He parked out front. He’d run for supper. Hadley liked Chinese food, Mexican, or something from the deli. She liked cream and pickled herring best, curious for an old Protestant woman. Edgar wondered if some Jew in Savannah had given her a kind word once, maybe he’d even loved her. Auntie’s wild loss.
“Well phooey,” she said, out before he could help. “You were supposed to drive into the garage. There should be something in there for you by now. It’s something that looked good for you. I had some advice.”
Edgar walked to the garage. What would need a garage — lawn mower, weed eater, leaf blower? Something meek and janitorial.
When he nicked on the light, he could hardly reckon on it. It was a showroom-new, cream-colored BMW motorcycle. He was knocked dumber when he recalled what they cost. The keys were in it and he had to get on and drive, ho neighbors! But first he must see his aunt.
She was at her Manhattan, watching the television news.
“Thank you. What does it. . mean?” That she projects I’ll kill myself. But a new one wasn’t required. He’d almost done it on that piece of rolling bones an era ago.
“I thought about you lumbering in to park that Chrysler on campus. Not really fit. I’m told these motorcycles are ‘hot’ with your young professionals.”
“I’m staggered. Thanks again.”
“Get on the thing. Drive it, Edgar.”
“Yes, I will.”
“It must be a great fight, staying sober.”
He was trying to see something of his father’s face in Auntie Hadley’s: a long-nosed projection of the nostrils, a gathering of the lips into a plump rabbit bite. Another animal was present, too, in the forehead and eyes: a monkey. Some breed rarefied by spite and terror, squawling from a nook in a rain forest. But his father’s face was pleasantly usual, as in one of those old ads of a bus driver inviting you aboard, happy hills and vales ahead.
“Frankly, boy, I wish you were more interesting.” She studied him back. “Your father really didn’t give you much to shoot for, did he?” Could the troll guess he was thinking of his father? His regular face. His father was deferential, almost unctuous, and uncritical. He was all right, was his father, Oliver. He should see him soon.
His father was a newspaperman — no, that was too strong a word — whose regular column in the local paper was, essentially, one timid paragraph of introduction to a reprinted item of obscure history. The articles illustrated that people of the past were much like ourselves. He had little money, few other interests except choir, and viewed himself as a meek servant of the Big Picture. His only small vanity was in seeing his articles reprinted elsewhere every now and then. Edgar knew that outside the small-town antiquarian South, a larger newspaper would have pulled the trapdoor on his father and his monkish library work. His father had wanted to be a history teacher but could not face the classroom. In the forties, in fact, a huge bully of a student, smelling out his fear, beat him up. Hadley had dutifully reported this to Edgar when he was newly in the house. He was also informed that Sue, Edgar’s mother, had always made more than her husband, doing the books of shops around town. She was a CPA. They were faithful moderate Methodists. His father — he hated this — sang in the church choir. He did not like him forming the big prayerful O’s with his mouth, his eyes on the director, a sissy. The BMW was coming with a great tax. He felt murderous. He should have known.
“When men were realler, they drank for good reasons. Look at Grant and Churchill with their great wars. Look at Poe and Faulkner and Jack London and their masterpieces. Now you’ve got a national curse of drugs and drink, millions of nobodies who never once had a great day or a fine thought. This puny selfism, uff! It seems to me you became a drunkard just for lack of something to do. Just a miserable fad. No direction, no strong legs under you.” She was building.
“Don’t you want to add ‘no intestinal fortitude’?” Edgar said helpfully, blazing inside.
“Now your proposed treatise or whatever, Bums of. Name your poison. Why, Lord, that’s less a topic than a confession of kin. You want to go to school and still wallow with the wretched? Where’s the merit? With your history, it seems you’d seek something higher for your interest. You’d have got a snootful of bums in the Depression. It took a Roosevelt and a world war to get them off the streets.”
“I suppose”—this was the limit—“you labored greatly for your fortune and all was perfect with your marriages.” Her first husband, by what Edgar knew, amassed his wealth in lumber and chickens by deliberate long hours away from her. The second, before he went willfully deaf, was something of a bonds genius. He built this vast house — for her, why? — then fled to a single basement room where he did woodwork with loud tools.
“You’re a spiteful young person. And not very young. I was not idle. I guided their affairs, if you want to know. I had presence and spirit. Both your uncles had weak hearts and not very much will. I don’t know why God matched me with such invalids, but that was what I got. I’m not the prettiest thing on the block.”
Her voice had quieted to something like a lament. He wondered how deeply she believed herself. What was the truth? Maybe he was the last of her invalids. Maybe she must have them. When was she going to die?
“Well, about supper.”
“I’m no good for supper now, thank you. Go ride your present. Ride it, please, with one thing in mind: your talent. I’ve read your letters, of course, and I saw your notes, scrambled as they are. You can write. You have seen trouble. You have conquered a great flaw. Now, Edgar, nobody has known it, but I have diaries. I have jotted histories of my time. I believe there would be a discerning audience for it. And you can write it.”
“Write what?”
“My life. My life and times.”
He turned and went to the motorcycle, still in his suit, drenched with perspiration and stinking of acrimony. The BMW seemed a nasty, irrelevant toy. A mighty vision shot to hell. But when he got it going down the streets, big beam out front, sweet cut grass smells flowing by, the wind whipping, he began to giggle. There it was: her patronage, her life as done by Edgar who could write no more at all. He drove on to Emma’s. Why not?
He felt rangy, and much better. In the summer his work in the classroom went well. He knew many of the answers and seemed to have the good questions too. His more rural peers gave him some reverence. Some of them were hardly more cosmopolitan than the rube who sang about Kansas City in the musical Oklahoma!
Even better, Emma Dean seemed to be going for him. He recalled Snooky and tracked the difference. This time he had to do almost nothing. It was a rapid impassioning with young Emma — was she twenty-seven? But there was an unhappy strangeness to it on her part. She wanted him near, but it seemed she wanted him mournfully. The affair was making her sad. But Emma persisted: she bought him things, and slyly hinted at the times when Michael the Math Monster, who was deaf, would be out of the mobile home. She told him mysteries about the deaf and what they knew. What that permanent silence gave them — some claimed to hear music from heaven, or right from the brain.
One night in mid-June she was impatient and gloomy, yet suddenly she pulled off her dress. This “courting” could not go on forever — they weren’t infants. She did cry out like a panther, bless her. Edgar was very happy, but she wept. She wouldn’t tell him why, and he could only tenderly guess, remembering her history. He knew things would get better, more natural. Most stunning, though, was the certain knowledge she would be his last woman. The truth banged him with an enormous bright weight — at last things were in motion. He was very lucky to have her. And this time he would not destroy.