My brother didn’t mind that I had tried to kill him. He always liked it when I showed signs of life.
What He Was Like
HE kept a diary, for his own pleasure. Because the days passed by so rapidly, and he found it interesting to go back and see how he had occupied his time, and with whom. He was aware that his remarks were sometimes far from kind, but the person they were about was never going to read them, so what difference did it make? The current diary was usually on his desk, the previous ones on a shelf in his clothes closet, where they were beginning to take up room.
His wife’s uncle, in the bar of the Yale Club, said, “I am at the age of funerals.” Now, thirty-five years later, it was his turn. In his address book the names of his three oldest friends had lines drawn through them. “Jack is dead,” he wrote in his diary. “I didn’t think that would happen. I thought he was immortal.… Louise is dead. In her sleep.… Richard has been dead for over a year and I still do not believe it. So impoverishing.”
He himself got older. His wife got older. They advanced deeper into their seventies without any sense of large changes but only of one day’s following another, and of the days being full, and pleasant, and worth recording. So he went on doing it. They all got put down in his diary, along with his feelings about old age, his fear of dying, his declining sexual powers, his envy of the children that he saw running down the street. To be able to run like that! He had to restrain himself from saying to young men in their thirties and forties, “You do appreciate, don’t you, what you have?” In his diary he wrote, “If I had my life to live over again — but one doesn’t. One goes forward instead, dragging a cart piled high with lost opportunities.”
Though his wife had never felt the slightest desire to read his diary, she knew when he stopped leaving it around as carelessly as he did his opened mail. Moving the papers on his desk in order to dust it she saw where he had hidden the current volume, was tempted to open it and see what it was he didn’t want her to know, and then thought better of it and replaced the papers, exactly as they were before.
“To be able to do in your mind,” he wrote, “what it is probably not a good idea to do in actuality is a convenience not always sufficiently appreciated.” Though in his daily life he was as cheerful as a cricket, the diaries were more and more given over to dark thoughts, anger, resentment, indecencies, regrets, remorse. And now and then the simple joy in being alive. “If I stopped recognizing that I want things that it is not appropriate for me to want,” he wrote, “wouldn’t this inevitably lead to my not wanting anything at all — which as people get older is a risk that must be avoided at all costs?” He wrote, “Human beings are not like a clock that is wound up at birth and runs until the mainspring is fully unwound. They live because they want to. And when they stop wanting to, the first thing they know they are in a doctor’s office being shown an X ray that puts a different face on everything.”
AFTER he died, when the funeral had been got through, and after the number of telephone calls had diminished to a point where it was possible to attend to other things, his wife and and daughter together disposed of the clothes in his closet. His daughter folded and put in a suit box an old, worn corduroy coat that she remembered the feel of when her father had rocked her as a child. His wife kept a blue-green sweater that she was used to seeing him in. As for the rest, he was a common size, and so his shirts and suits were easily disposed of to people who were in straitened circumstances and grateful for a warm overcoat, a dark suit, a pair of pigskin gloves. His shoes were something else again, and his wife dropped them into the Goodwill box, hoping that somebody would turn up who wore size-9A shoes, though it didn’t seem very likely. Then the two women were faced with the locked filing cabinet in his study, which contained business papers that they turned over to the executor, and most of the twenty-seven volumes of his diary.
“Those I don’t know what to do with, exactly,” his wife said. “They’re private and he didn’t mean anybody to read them.”
“Did he say so?” his daughter said.
“No.”
“Then how do you know he didn’t want anybody to read them?”
“I just know.”
“You’re not curious?”
“I was married to your father for forty-six years and I know what he was like.”
Which could only mean, the younger woman decided, that her mother had, at some time or other, looked into them. But she loved her father, and felt a very real desire to know what he was like as a person and not just as a father. So she put one of the diaries aside and took it home with her.
When her husband got home from his office that night, her eyes were red from weeping. First he made her tell him what the trouble was, and then he went out to the kitchen and made a drink for each of them, and then he sat down beside her on the sofa. Holding his free hand, she began to tell him about the shock of reading the diary.
“He wasn’t the person I thought he was. He had all sorts of secret desires. A lot of it is very dirty. And some of it is more unkind than I would have believed possible. And just not like him — except that it was him. It makes me feel I can never trust anybody ever again.”
“Not even me?” her husband said soberly.
“Least of all, you.”
They sat in silence for a while. And then he said, “I was more comfortable with him than I was with my own father. And I think, though I could be mistaken, that he liked me.”
“Of course he liked you. He often said so.”
“So far as his life is concerned, if you were looking for a model to —”
“I don’t see how you can say that.”
“I do, actually. In his place, though, I think I would have left instructions that the diaries were to be disposed of unread.… We could burn it. Burn all twenty-seven volumes.”
“No.”
“Then put it back in the locked file where your mother found it,” he said.
“And leave it there forever?”
“For a good long while. He may have been looking past our shoulders. It would be like him. If we have a son who doesn’t seem to be very much like you or me, or like anybody in your family or mine, we can give him the key to the file —”
“If I had a son the last thing in the world I’d want would be for him to read this filth!”
“— and tell him he can read them if he wants to. And if he doesn’t want to, he can decide what should be done with them. It might be a help to him to know that there was somebody two generations back who wasn’t in every respect what he seemed to be.”
“Who was, in fact —”
“Since he didn’t know your father, he won’t be shocked and upset. You stay right where you are while I make us another of these.”
But she didn’t. She didn’t want to be separated from him, even for the length of time it would take him to go out to the kitchen and come back with a margarita suspended from the fingers of each hand, lest in that brief interval he turn into a stranger.
A SET OF TWENTY-ONE
IMPROVISATIONS
1. A love story
“MADAME MOLE,” everyone said, out of respect. For what she was and how she did things. The thick fur and the usually cold eye that saw immediately the disadvantages of a poorly located and badly laid out tunnel. Her own tunnel had never been equaled and indeed the full extent of it, taking both the upper and the lower level into consideration, was only guessed at, for visitors had seen only the first hundred anterooms. She was descended on her mother’s side from the Moles of Longview, whose enormous spreading family tree had for its trunk a mole brought over in a cage by one of William the Conqueror’s body servants. It escaped during the Battle of Hastings, into a land that had hitherto been happily free of them, and before that fatal moment when Harold glanced up at the sun and received an arrow in his eye, the mole had already established a temporary home under the battlefield. The family was ennobled under William Rufus, for the harassment they had caused the Sax
ons, and Charles II made the ninetieth baronet an earl in gratitude for the number of Cromwell’s horses that had stepped in a tunnel and — but it is better not to go into all that, especially if you like horses. In a time of war, disasters are to be expected, unless you are a mole and can go below into the silence of old roots, and sleeping grubs, and ant chambers, flints, and fossils.
Madame Mole’s husband was never called anything but Mole, for she had married beneath her. His family didn’t bear thinking of, but he was a large good-natured willing creature, and, though not very many of her acquaintances realized this, she would have been nowhere without him. For she designed the new shafts of her great masterwork and he went to work with the hard end of his socially undistinguished nose and by nightfall there the new shaft was, ready for her to explore, and having reached the end of it, they would settle down cozily together and she would chew his ears by way of showing her love and appreciation. Then she would go about arranging the furniture and putting out pieces of bone china where they would show to advantage. What is the natural life of a mole? I don’t actually know, but a good long time, I should think. Mole traps rust immediately and are notoriously inefficient, and what exasperated gardener is willing to stand waiting at twenty minutes after 10 a.m. and twenty minutes after 4 p.m. for the barely perceptible heaving at the end of a run, and start furiously digging with a spade when it begins. Not one mole in a hundred thousand meets with an accident of any kind, and when it does happen you can be sure it was because they had grown careless. What happened to Madame Mole and her husband was something so much larger than a mere accident that they were at a loss to describe it. They were lying in bed one morning and she was comfortably chewing on his ear, when he saw that the bedroom chandelier was swinging. “Stop jiggling the bed,” she said, and he said, “I’m not. It’s doing it.” At which point all the fine china plates fell off the wall and broke into smithereens and dirt began raining down on the bedsheets. While he was taking in what was happening, she leapt out of bed and rushed to each of the seven doors in turn. What should have been a shaft, and was a shaft when they went to sleep the night before, was blocked with stones, timbers, and rubbish. In places she could see the sky, and it would not have been too difficult to tunnel up into the open, at this stage, but think what would meet them if they did! She took hold of his ear with her teeth and dragged him out of the bed and under it, and while she lay huddled next to him in fright, he put his hard nose to the ground and started tunneling. Straight down, hour after hour, without any plan to guide him or any consideration for how it would look when the furniture was arranged and the china plates hung where they would show to best advantage: The Longview Willow and Spode that had come down to her from the Shaftsburys, and the hand-painted Limoges chocolate set that was a wedding present from Cousin Emma Noseby and I forget what all, but she never forgot. An earthquake was what they assumed it must be, and it did bear certain resemblances to an earthquake, for after a period of very difficult going suddenly they would find themselves in a fissure leading straight down toward the center of the earth, and then it was possible to make very good progress with no effort whatsoever. Machines is what it was. Huge yellow machines rented out by an Italian contractor at two, three, and four hundred dollars a day. Weighing many tons. Big enough to lift great trees and fling them aside, with their roots exposed to the shocked gaze of the sky. The arrangements of thousands and thousands of years — roots, stones, fossilized ferns, and fossilized fish from the earliest years of the planet were crushed, scraped up in huge mechanical shovels, poured into trucks, and hauled away to desecrate some other part of the landscape. And if Madame Mole and Mole had emerged from their ruined mansion to see what was happening, they would have been scooped up with the Longview Willow, and the sweet-smelling leaf mold of centuries, the dear green grass, and the murdered trees. There had been nothing to equal it in the way of pure destruction since the Battle of Hastings. If it had been for a housing development Madame Mole would have perhaps accepted it with some degree of philosophic resignation. She could understand homemaking even when it was aboveground and so not very practical. But this was to make an eight-lane highway for cars, a means for more people to get away from their homes faster, because of all the things that had made home unbearable — the polluted air, the noise of jet airplanes and so on. It is just as well they never knew the nature of the disaster that sent them down, down, down to the center of the earth. When they reached it they had no idea. It was dark there, of course, and he had left his wristwatch on the table beside their bed, and so they simply kept on going. When he grew tired or discouraged she chewed on his ear until he felt better. And when she wept thinking of all of her treasures left behind, he curled his fur tightly around her fur and in the shared warmth they fell asleep. And when they woke he commenced digging. Eventually the soil began to be looser, and the grubs more frequent, and finally there were root hairs and then big roots and suddenly without any warning they emerged into broad daylight. They were in a terraced field, on a mountainside, in a country that Madame Mole recognized instantly because there was the blue leaning willow tree, and there was the lake, and the bluebird in the sky, and the blue curlicue clouds, and the houses with eaves that curled up at the corners. It was a view she had seen ever since she could remember, because it was on every single piece of the Longview Willow china. “Oh you clever Mole, how glad I am I married you!” she cried, and they withdrew into the tunnel so that, chewing on his ear, she could plan the layout of their new home.
2. The industrious tailor
ONCE upon a time, in the west of England, there was an industrious tailor who was always sitting cross-legged, plying his needle, when the sun came up over the hill, and all day long he drove himself, as if he were beating a donkey with a stick. “I am almost through cutting out this velvet waistcoat,” he would tell himself, “and when I am through cutting the velvet, I will cut the yellow satin lining. And then there is the buckram, and the collar and cuffs. The cuffs are to be thirteen inches wide, tapering to ten and a half — his lordship was very particular about that detail — and faced with satin. The basting should take me into the afternoon, and if all goes well, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t, I ought to be able to do all twenty-seven buttonholes before the light gives out.”
When snow lay deep on the ground and the sheep stayed in their pens, the shepherd came down to the tavern and in the conviviality he found there made up for the months of solitude on the moors. During the early part of the summer, when it was not yet time for anybody to be bringing wheat, barley, and rye to the mill to be ground into flour, the miller got out his hook and line and went fishing. In one way or another, everyone had some time that he called his own. On the first of May, lads and lasses went into the wood just before daybreak and came back wearing garlands of flowers and with their arms around each other. From his window the tailor saw them setting up the Maypole, but he did not lay aside his needle and thread to go join in the dancing. It is true that he was no longer young and, with his bald head and his bent back and his solemn manner, would have looked odd dancing around a Maypole, but that did not deter the miller’s wife, who weighed seventeen stone and was as light on her feet as a fairy and didn’t care who laughed at her as long as she was enjoying herself.
When the industrious tailor came to the end of all the work that he could expect for a while and his worktable was quite bare, he looked around for some lily that needed gilding. Sorting his pins, sharpening his scissors, and rearranging his patterns, he congratulated himself on keeping busy, though he might just as well have been sitting in his doorway enjoying the sun, for his scissors didn’t need sharpening, and his patterns were not in disorder, and a pin is a pin, no matter what tray you put it in.
As with all of us, the tailor’s upbringing had a good deal to do with the way he behaved. At the age of eight, he was apprenticed to his father, who was a master tailor and not only knew all there is to know about making clothes but also was full of nat
ive wisdom. While the boy was learning to sew a straight seam and how to cut cloth on the diagonal and that sort of thing, the father would from time to time raise his right hand, with the needle and thread in it, and, looking at the boy over the top of his spectacles, say “A stitch in time saves nine,” or “Waste makes want,” or some other bit of advice, which the boy took to his bosom and cherished. And he had never forgotten a wonderful story his father told about an ant and a grasshopper. Of all his father’s sayings, the one that made the deepest impression on him was “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today,” though as a rule the industrious tailor had already done it yesterday and was hard at work on something that did not need to be done until the day after.
WHAT is true of the day after tomorrow is equally true of the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that, and so on, and in time a very curious thing happened. There was the past — there is always the past — and it was full of accomplishment, of things done well before they needed to be done, and the tailor regarded it with satisfaction. And there was the future, when things would have to be done, and bills would have to be made out and respectfully submitted and paid or not paid, as the case might be, and new work would be ordered, and so on. But it was never right now. The present had ceased to exist. When the industrious tailor looked out of the window and saw that it was raining, it was not raining today but on a day in the middle of next week, or the week after that, if he was that far ahead of himself, and he often was. You would have thought that he would sooner or later have realized that the time he was spending so freely was next month’s, and that if he had already lived through the days of this month before it was well begun he was living beyond his means. But what is “already”? What is “now”? The words had lost their meaning. And this was not as serious as it sounds, because words are, after all, only words. “I could kill you for doing that,” a man says to his wife and then they both cheerfully sit down to dinner. And many people live entirely in the past, without even noticing it. One day the tailor pushed his glasses up on his forehead and saw that he was in the middle of a lonely wood. He rubbed his poor tired eyes, but the trees didn’t go away. He looked all around. No scissors and pins, no bolts of material, no patterns, no worktable, no shop. Only the needle and thread he had been sewing with. He listened anxiously. He had never been in a wood before. “Wife?” he called out, but there was no answer.