Call If You Need Me (17 page)

Two months later, in January 1978, I found myself in Plainfield, Vermont, on the campus of Goddard College. Toby Wolff, looking every bit as anxious and alarmed as I must have
looked, had the cell-like room next to my cell in a condemned barracks building that had formerly been used to house rich kids looking for an alternative to the usual college education. We were there, Toby and I, for a two-week residency and were then expected to go home and work with five or six graduate students through the mail, helping them to write short stories. It was thirty-six degrees below zero, eighteen inches of snow lay on the ground, and Plainfield was the coldest place in the country.

No one, it seems to me, could have been more surprised to find himself at Goddard College in Vermont in January than Toby or I. In Toby’s case he was there only because the writer who was supposed to be on board had to cancel at the last minute because of illness. But the writer had suggested Toby in his stead. And not only did Ellen Voigt, the director of the program, invite Toby, sight unseen, but miracle of miracles, she took a chance on a recovering alcoholic still in the early stages of getting well.

The first two nights in the barracks, Toby had insomnia and couldn’t sleep. But I liked the way he didn’t complain and could even joke about having given up sleep. And I was drawn to him too, I think, because of what I sensed to be his vulnerability; in certain ways he was even more vulnerable than I was, and that’s saying something. We were in the company of writers, fellow faculty members, who were, some of them, among the most distinguished in the country. Toby didn’t have a book out, though he had published several stories in the literary magazines. I’d published a book, a couple in fact, but I hadn’t written anything in a long time and didn’t feel much like a writer. I remember waking up at five one morning, suffering my own anxieties, to find Toby at the kitchen table eating a sandwich and drinking some milk. He looked deranged and as if he hadn’t slept in days, which he hadn’t. We were glad of each other’s uneasy company. I made us some cocoa and we began to talk. It seemed important to be telling each other things there in the kitchen that morning; it was still dark outside and so cold we could hear the trees snap from time to time. From the little
window over the sink we could see the northern lights.

For the remaining days of the residency, we hung out when we could, taught a class on Chekhov together and laughed a lot. We both felt we’d been down on our luck, but felt too that our luck just might be changing. Toby said I should come and see him if ever I got to Phoenix, and of course I said sure. Sure. I mentioned to him that I’d met Richard Ford not too long before, who, it turned out, was good friends with Toby’s brother, Geoffrey, a man I was to meet and become friends with myself a year or so later. The web again.

In 1980 Richard and Toby became friends. I like it when my friends meet, take a liking to each other and establish their own friendship. I feel all the more enriched. But I can recall Richard’s reservation, just before meeting Toby: “I’m sure he’s a good guy,” Richard said. “But I don’t
need
any more friends in my life right now. I have all the friends I can accommodate. I can’t do right by my old friends as it is.”

I’ve had two lives. My first life ended in June 1977, when I stopped drinking. I didn’t have many friends left by then, mostly casual acquaintances and drinking pals. I’d lost my friends. Either they’d faded away—and who could blame them?—or else they’d simply plummeted out of sight and, more’s the pity, I don’t think I even missed them or noted their passing.

Would I choose, saying I had to choose, a life of poverty and ill health, if that was the only way I could keep the friends I have? No. Would I give up my place on the lifeboat, that is to say, die, for any one of my friends? I hesitate, but again the answer is an unheroic no. They wouldn’t, any of them, for me either, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. We understand each other perfectly in this, and in most other ways as well. Partly we’re friends because we
do
understand that. We love each other, but we love ourselves a little more.

Back to the picture. We’re feeling good about ourselves and about other things in our life as well. We like being writers.
There’s nothing else on earth we’d rather be, though we’ve all been something else too at one time or another. Still, we like it enormously that things have worked out so that we can be together in London. We’re having fun, you see. We’re friends. And friends are supposed to have a good time when they get together.

There is a line of prose from the writings of Saint Teresa which seemed more and more appropriate as I thought toward this occasion, so I want to offer a meditation on that sentence. It was used as an epigraph to a recent collection of poems by Tess Gallagher, my dear friend and companion who is here with me today, and I take the line from the context of her epigraph.

Saint Teresa, that extraordinary woman who lived 373 years ago, said: “Words lead to deeds.… They prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness.”

There is clarity and beauty in that thought expressed in just this way. I’ll say it again, because there is also something a little foreign in this sentiment coming to our attention at this remove, in a time certainly less openly supportive of the important connection between what we say and what we do: “Words lead to deeds.… They prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness.”

There is something more than a little mysterious, not to say—forgive me—even mystical about these particular words and the way Saint Teresa used them, with full weight and belief. True enough, we realize they appear almost as echoes of some former, more considered time. Especially the mention of the word “soul,” a word we don’t encounter much these days outside of church and perhaps in the “soul” section of the record store.

“Tenderness”—that’s another word we don’t hear much these days, and certainly not on such a public, joyful occasion as this. Think about it: when was the last time you used the word or heard it used? It’s in as short a supply as that other word, “soul.”

There is a wonderfully described character named Moiseika in Chekhov’s story “Ward No. 6” who, although he has been consigned to the madhouse wing of the hospital, has picked up the habit of a certain kind of tenderness. Chekhov writes: “Moiseika likes to make himself useful. He gives his companions water, and covers them up when they are asleep; he promises each of them to bring him back a kopeck, and to make him a new cap; he feeds with a spoon his neighbor on the left, who is paralyzed.”

Even though the word tenderness isn’t used, we feel its presence in these details, even when Chekhov goes on to enter a disclaimer by way of this commentary on Moiseika’s behavior: “He acts in this way, not from compassion nor from any considerations of a humane kind, but through imitation, unconsciously dominated by Gromov, his neighbor on the right hand.”

In a provocative alchemy, Chekhov combines words and deeds to cause us to reconsider the origin and nature of tenderness. Where does it come from? As a deed, does it still move the heart, even when abstracted from humane motives?

Somehow, the image of the isolate man performing gentle acts without expectation or even self-knowledge stays before us as an odd beauty we have been brought to witness. It may even reflect back upon our own lives with a questioning gaze.

There is another scene from “Ward No. 6” in which two characters, a disaffected doctor and an imperious postmaster, his elder, suddenly find themselves discussing the human soul.

“And you do not believe in the immortality of the soul?” the postmaster asks suddenly.

“No, honored Mihail Averyanitch; I do not believe it, and have no grounds for believing it.”

“I must own I doubt it too,” Mihail Averyanitch admits. “And yet I have a feeling as though I should never die. Oh, I think to myself: ‘Old fogey, it is time you were dead!’ But there is a little voice in my soul says: ‘Don’t believe it; you won’t die.’ ”

The scene ends but the words linger as deeds. “A little voice in
the soul” is born. Also the way we have perhaps dismissed certain concepts about life, about death, suddenly gives over unexpectedly to belief of an admittedly fragile but insistent nature.

Long after what I’ve said has passed from your minds, whether it be weeks or months, and all that remains is the sensation of having attended a large public occasion, marking the end of one significant period in your lives and the beginning of another, try then, as you work out your individual destinies, to remember that words, the right and true words, can have the power of deeds.

Remember too, that little-used word that has just about dropped out of public and private usage: tenderness. It can’t hurt. And that other word: soul—call it spirit if you want, if it makes it any easier to claim the territory. Don’t forget that either. Pay attention to the spirit of your words, your deeds. That’s preparation enough. No more words.

Rain threatens. Already the tops of the hills across the valley are obscured by the heavy gray mist. Quick shifting black clouds with white furls and caps are coming from the hills, moving down the valley and passing over the fields and vacant lots in front of the apartment house. If Farrell lets go his imagination he can see the clouds as black horses with flared white manes and, turning behind, slowly, inexorably, black chariots, here and there a white-plumed driver. He shuts the screen door now and watches his wife step slowly down the stairs. She turns at the bottom and smiles, and he opens the screen and waves. In another moment she drives off. He goes back into the room and sits down in the big leather chair under the brass lamp, laying his arms straight out along the sides of the chair.

It is a little darker in the room when Iris comes out of her bath wrapped in a loose white dressing gown. She pulls the stool out from under the dresser and sits down in front of the mirror. With her right hand she takes up a white plastic brush, the handle inset with imitation pearl, and begins combing out her hair in long, sweeping, rhythmical movements, the brush passing down through the length of the hair with a faint squeaking noise. She holds her hair down over the one shoulder with her left hand and makes the long, sweeping, rhythmical movements with the right.

She stops once and switches on the lamp over the mirror. Farrell takes up a glossy picture magazine from the stand beside the chair and reaches up to turn on the lamp, fumbling against the parchment-like shade in his hunt for the chain. The lamp is
two feet over his right shoulder and the brown shade crackles as he touches it.

It is dark outside and the air smells of rain. Iris asks if he will close the window. He looks up at the window, now a mirror, seeing himself and, behind, Iris sitting at the dresser watching him, with another, darker Farrell staring into another window beside her. He has yet to call Frank and confirm the hunting trip for the next morning. He turns the pages. Iris takes down the brush from her hair and taps it on the dresser edge.

“Lew,” she says, “you know I’m pregnant?”

Under the lamplight the glossy pages are open now to a halftone, two-page picture of a disaster scene, an earthquake, somewhere in the Near East. There are five almost fat men dressed in white, baggy pants standing in front of a flattened house. One of the men, probably the leader, is wearing a dirty white hat that hangs down over one eye giving him a secret, malevolent look. He is looking sideways at the camera, pointing across the mess of blocks to a river or a neck of the sea on the far side of the rubble. Farrell closes the magazine and lets it slide out of his lap as he stands. He turns out the light and then, before going on through to the bathroom, asks: “What are you going to do?” The words are dry, hurrying like old leaves into the dark corners of the room and Farrell feels at the same instant the words are out that the question has already been asked by someone else, a long time ago. He turns and goes into the bathroom.

It smells of Iris; a warm, moist odor, slightly sticky; New Spring talc and King’s Idyll cologne. Her towel lies across the back of the toilet. In the sink she has spilled talcum. It is wet now and pasty and makes a thick yellow ring around the white sides. He rubs it out and washes it into the drain.

He is shaving. By turning his head, he can see into the living room. Iris in profile sitting on the stool in front of the old dresser. He lays down the razor and washes his face, then picks up the razor again. At this moment he hears the first few drops of rain spatter against the roof …

After a while he turns out the light over the dresser and sits down again in the big leather chair, listening to the rain. The rain comes in short, fluttery swishes against his window. The soft fluttering of a white bird.

His sister has caught it. She keeps it in a box, dropping in flowers for it through the top, sometimes shaking the box so they can hear it fluttering its wings against the sides until one morning she shows him, holding out the box, there is no fluttering inside. Only a lumpy, scraping sound the bird makes as she tilts the box from one side to the other. When she gives it to him to get rid of he throws box and all into the river, not wanting to open it for it has started to smell funny. The cardboard box is eighteen inches long and six inches wide and four inches deep, and he is sure it is a Snowflake cracker box because this is what she used for the first few birds.

He runs along the squashy bank following. It is a funeral boat and the muddy river is the Nile and it will soon run into the ocean but before that the boat will burn up and the white bird will fly out and into his father’s fields someplace where he will hunt out the bird in some thick growth of green meadow grass, eggs and all. He runs along the bank, the brush whipping his pants, and once a limb hits him on the ear, and it still hasn’t burned. He pulls loose some rocks from the bank and begins throwing them at the boat. And then the rain begins; huge, gusty, spattering drops that belt the water, sweeping across the river from one shore to the other.