He resented this, and braced. But she wasn’t her old self. He frankly liked her pleading.
“You, if you could just do a bit of work every day, say two hours, on our book. You could make your own notes and start the outline, almost idly. Do the readings. I’m offering you treasured, secret views of a heart and mind that has been through crucial times. You never knew, for instance, that I had my day with music, did you? Not your noisy success, not your. . bubble. My time was milder and private as girls were taught. Why, I’d play an afternoon triumph of Chopin, there would be Father, sneaking in to listen in the hall. He’d have tears running down his cheeks. Too, I did dollwork, their porcelain faces showing history and nationality when there was no world-consciousness in Georgia at all. They’re still in the attic for you to see. And I will be constantly available for you to consult. I’ve bought a new tape recorder, which is of course yours after our interviews are done. I’ve completed an outline. We can compare outlines once—”
The horror! as Edgar Alien Po’ Boy might have written, grabbed him.
“I was no mean student, nephew, but in composition I couldn’t quite express myself, though I was excellent in elocution. Ethical elocution — I was the star there. My first husband dragged me from college. There was heartbreak. Big moments in the sun were probably waiting for me! But love, love, was the order of the day. Edgar, I’m not going to live forever, I wouldn’t think.”
Was that a frightened giggle, a voice from a little girl in her horse-drawn carriage?
“Academic people, I’ve noticed, will delay things forever. Why, I sent some things to the press at Athens years ago. It took a year to get them back, and with a beastly note, beastly.”
Edgar became, though sickened, interested in the long confession. Here was a sick glee, close to a great pop of vodka in a rushing airplane.
“In Savannah, old Savannah! there were gay times. Homosexuals won’t steal that term! There were lanterns on the levee indeed. I was good with horses. What a picture, I on my roan Sweetheart on the way to third grade in the city! Horses were thought elegant, a whole culture gone with the wind! Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage in ten days, I believe. Not that you, with all our source material — seventy-three years! But Edgar, you are falling behind. I won’t watch you do that again! You’ve a degree from one of our great universities.”
“I’ll read and form an opinion,” said Edgar flatly with ire.
“Further, it would be all right, I would allow, to have Miss Dean stay here with you. You can have a larger room — Hank’s, with his special woodwork, and a television, too, and his Victrola, unused since his deafness. I’m no prude. I can modernize. I don’t want you at that trailer. A man needs pleasure, but in the right place. I’ll put in the large couch with a fold-out. We’ll get right to it. Shelley had his muse.”
“Didn’t she write Frankenstein?”
You couldn’t get to the old thing anymore. She just faded away.
That night, Emma still in grief, he sat his horn cases on his desk next to the books. He didn’t know quite what he was doing. Both things made him sick. He stared a long time, judging the contest.
At the end of the summer after two major exams, essay-type, the chairman called him in. Edgar liked him. No great achiever either in the classroom or in research (though there was a rumored thin book, When God Was a Boy, they said), Schmidt cheered the worthy and had no envy. He said Edgar looked good, but there was a problem.
“Your prose style. Your writing. We don’t see that kind much. I agree academe needs shaking, but there is a sort of. . grunt-talk, a primitive getting-there. Seems almost to cause you. . pain. And some to the reader. Now I am a Hemingway fan, a Raymond Carver zealot, but are you trying something new, dimensional, I don’t know, would this fit the bums’ world, is that what?”
“No, sir. I’m not trying anything that I’m aware of.”
“This is your best?”
“I’m looking for an awakening, I guess. In the old days at Northwestern, though, I could write better.”
“Then we’ll just root for you. I appreciate your honesty. We want to get life and expression together. Isn’t that the whole point?”
“Sure.”
“The example of pain into flowers, ho?”
Edgar nodded.
“Because very soon it’s thesis time for you. There are outside readers.”
Peets Lambert and his band came into town, out from seeming nowhere. Lambert was still alive. Someone called Edgar from the college and said Lambert had left tickets for him in the chapel where they’d play. The student coordinator later said Lambert was very cordial and, whoa, eighty-five years old. It had been almost twenty years since Edgar first played with the band. Lambert remembered him well and wanted to chat after the concert. The student, who knew Edgar, said Lambert wanted to know everything about him and had even driven by his aunt’s house, but had found nobody home the previous afternoon.
Edgar, Emma and Auntie Hadley went together. Emma thought it would be cruel not to invite her. She’d love big band swing. This would be quite the sentimental evening for everybody! Obscurely, Emma had gotten happy again.
And swing it was. Snooky wasn’t there, nor anybody near her age. Lambert had brought back some of his old friends including Woodrow and settled for what he could get on the nostalgia circuit — hence La Grange. By far he was the leading ancient, but several in the band were close. They had a bad singer, and no one looked particularly happy in their black suits. The playing was sloppy and sometimes verged on the funereal. But Lambert hammed and was hip, very, like a confident ghost pawing at the band. Surprisingly, Edgar sat through it calmly. It was a sort of music, and he did not hate it, he was not made ill. To his left, he saw his aunt looked very pleased. Her eyes seemed to be swooning back in her biography. The band played a Charleston, capping with the bad singer, the only leaping youth in the band. The students who were there — not many — liked it, they were charmed.
So when the band was breaking up, Edgar and Emma went backstage, which barely existed. There was Lambert, alone, unmobbed, smoking a cigarette but looking guilty, same as years ago. The old cancer thinness was on him, his face speckled and translucent on its skull. He lit up when he saw Edgar.
“I know you, my ’boner. Oops, sorry little lady!” His naughty hipness was imperishable, sealed with him. He wasn’t missing a thing with those eyes. Edgar wondered if his hearing, however, had dimmed.
He drew Edgar in, slipped into an undervoice — old collaborators — a few feet away from Emma, who was not really shut out. Lambert smiled over Edgar’s shoulders, always a dog for the wimmens. He told Edgar about Snooky, mother of two in Dallas. Parton Peavey had cleaned up and as everybody knew was a “rich old man, nearing the big four-oh.” Edgar was downed a little by how much they had aged.
“You guys didn’t know, but I invested for all of you, us, the cats, way back then. Young people, all they thought of was their axes. So there’s a piece of your salary you never saw. So, beautiful, it’s come to, da-dum, something big and tidy.”
Edgar jumped, very alert. He planned suddenly: cash in one bundle back to his aunt. A made man, he’d get his own place and fix up his parents’ house. He would buy an island, where? Emma would continue to work among the native deaf and he, what? He’d come out with a large thing from his meditative years.