Stillness & Shadows - John Gardner (different e readers TXT) 📗

wear when he came, and he’d go off with her to concerts or the Institute’s dances, and he’d stand around all evening hardly speaking to her friends, and not just from shyness: Joan had nagged him about it once in Emmy’s hearing and he’d answered, “What’s to say?” He’d often talked like a Jew or an Italian, in those days. Why it hurt her feelings, Emmy didn’t know. He had a cruel, vulgar streak. Joan liked nice things—clothes, furniture, houses. He was utterly indifferent, even scornful. He hurt her. Emmy saw it, but she was helpless. Joan was beautiful and lively, eager for life, and she’d fallen into the oldest trap in the world, or so it seemed to Emmy: she’d fallen in love with a handsome, gloomy-souled misanthrope. He could be funny when he wanted, and there were things he took pleasure in—how often she’d wished people who didn’t know him as the family did could see him at his best!—but no mistake, he was a dark one.

Nonetheless, they were married; there was no preventing it. Donald and John Elmer made an apartment for them upstairs in Donald and Emmy’s house. Buddy—or Martin, as Joan now called him, to his regal disgust—transferred to Washington University and took a part-time job in the Pine Lawn Bank. Joan gave up her chance to tour with the Symphony again—so willingly that Emmy couldn’t help but wonder if there hadn’t been some trouble—and took courses in music education to help Martin through graduate school. It was a strange two years. Sometimes they—the family—would sit up late playing bridge, or he and Emmy would have talks in the kitchen about the meaning of things, such as the value of religion even if it was false (he had strange ideas, and it was a long time since she’d played, except by herself, with strange ideas), and it seemed to Emmy that everything would be all right. But at other times she couldn’t help but think, however she fought it, that the marriage was nothing short of a crime, a shameful waste—a girl of Joan’s ability enslaving herself to a young man whose idea of a worthwhile life was writing stories and novels full of crude obscenities. Emmy said only, cautiously, “If you get your novel published, will you use your own name?” But Martin was at least attending classes now—doing well in them, in fact. For graduate school, to everyone’s amazement, especially Martin’s, he got a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. It paid what seemed to her a great deal of money.

They moved to Iowa and were happy, apparently, Joan teaching a great flock of Bohemian-American musical naturals (so she wrote), Martin sometimes helping, more often studying and writing every day, all day long, far into the night. Her letters were full of happiness and there was really no question that everything was wonderful, except that they couldn’t manage money. They were of course not the kinds of letters that encouraged you to read between the lines. Emmy would learn only long afterward that (as she’d suspected) they had their trials. They had fights sometimes. They had violent tempers, both of them, and Buddy—Martin—was selfish, prickly, he wanted to do nothing but work in his room. He was also resentful. He didn’t like it that Joan earned most of the money, didn’t like, ever, to be told what to do, hated even her gentlest suggestions, even hints that he might possibly clean his fingernails or buy new shoes when the soles were flapping when he walked. (On the other hand, of course, her “wit’s cutlery,” as Martin called it, was not always her best friend.) Martin was also secretive, sullen, and occasionally dishonest—he’d sometimes pretend he’d been at school all day when in fact he’d been home writing. He was a mess, really, though at times when they weren’t fighting that wasn’t Joan’s opinion. Beautiful, sunny Joan loved her sad-eyed Martin more and more. Partly she pitied him—held him when he had nightmares, soothed him when his black depressions got frightening. But also they had a good time together. The fiction he was writing now seemed to her fairly good, and he had cheerful moods when he would actually, as she put it, come out and play.

They collaborated on musical comedies, which earned them money and praise, and Joan, who’d never before acted, played comic parts and was an immediate sensation. When he met her after the first night’s performance, Martin was smiling, looking straight at her—he rarely looked straight at anyone. “You were funny,” he said. “As a matter of fact, you were fantastic.” Hard as both of them were working, there were numerous other things they did just for fun. They played in various little Czech village bands, both of them switching from instrument to instrument, when Joan wasn’t conducting. They gave summer music and painting lessons and threw parties where Joan’s teaching friends and Martin’s student-writer friends played games, from charades to volleyball, and no one got drunk, no one slipped away with someone else’s wife—in short, they were happy.

Only twice during those graduate-school years did she suffer that mysterious, searing pain. At the university hospital the doctor said, “Mrs. Orrick, we simply can’t help you. There’s really nothing there.” She knew, as Martin did, though they weren’t quite able to believe it yet, that whatever the X-rays showed or didn’t show, he couldn’t have been more mistaken.

Twelve

Though he was cranky and odd, arrogant, even insubordinate—as an instructor in the sophomore poetry course, he threw out the course plan for one of his own making, which lost him his job—Martin did well in graduate school and was even well liked by his professors and fellow students. He had a curious, small-boy innocence that sometimes made Joan love him till she thought her heart would break and sometimes made her want to stove his head in. Everything, with Martin, was principle. He might attack some classmate or professor without mercy, but never for an instant—as