News of the Spirit (4 page)

“Of course I want to,” I said.

We took our seats.

My story took place in a large, unnamed city on Christmas Eve. In this story, a whole happy family was trimming the Christmas tree, singing carols, and drinking hot chocolate while it snowed outside. I think I had “softly falling flakes.” Each person in the family was allowed to open one present—selected from the huge pile of gifts beneath the glittering tree—before bed. Then everyone went to sleep, and a “pregnant silence” descended. At three o’clock a fire broke out, and the whole house burned to the ground, and they all burned up, dying horrible deaths, which I described individually—conscious, as I read aloud, of some movement and sound among my listeners. But I didn’t dare look up as I approached the story’s ironic end: “When the fire trucks arrived, the only sign of life to be found was a blackened music box in the smoking ashes, softly playing ‘Silent Night.’”

By the end of my story, one girl had put her head down on her desk; another was having a coughing fit. Mr. Lefcowicz was staring intently out the window at the wintry day, his back to us. Then he made a great show of looking at his watch. “Whoops! Class dismissed!” he cried, grabbing his bookbag. He rushed from the room like the White Rabbit, already late.

But I was not that stupid.

As I walked across the cold, wet quadrangle toward my dormitory, I understood perfectly well that my story was terrible, laughable. I wanted to die. The gray sky, the dripping, leafless trees, fit my mood perfectly, and I remembered Mr. Lefcowicz saying, in an earlier class, that we must never manipulate nature to express our characters’ emotions. “Ha!” I muttered scornfully to the heavy sky.

The very next day, I joined the staff of the campus newspaper. I became its editor in the middle of my sophomore year—a job nobody else wanted, a job I really enjoyed. I had found a niche, a role, and although it was not what I had envisioned for myself, it was okay. Thus I became the following things: editor of the newspaper; member of Athena, the secret honor society; roommate of Dixie, the May Queen; friend of Phi Gams; and—especially—sister of Bubba, whose legend loomed ever larger. But I avoided both dates and creative writing classes for the next two years, finding Mr. Lefcowicz’s stale advice, “Write what you know,” more impossible with each visit home.

T
HE SUMMER BETWEEN MY SOPHOMORE AND JUNIOR
years was the hardest. The first night I was home, I realized that something was wrong with Mama when I woke up to hear water splashing in the downstairs bathroom. I went to investigate. There she was, wearing a lacy pink peignoir and her old gardening shoes, scrubbing the green tub.

“Oh, hi, Charlene!” she said brightly, and went on scrubbing, humming tunelessly to herself. A mop and bucket stood in the corner. I said good night and went back to my bedroom, where I looked at the clock; it was three-thirty a.m.

The next day, Mama burst into tears when Sam spilled a glass of iced tea, and the day after that, Daddy took her over to Petersburg and put her in the hospital. Memaw came in to stay with Sam during the day while I worked at Snow’s in South Hill, my old job.

I’d come home at suppertime each day to find Sam in his chair on the front porch, holding Blackie, waiting for me. He seemed to have gotten smaller somehow—and for the first time I realized that Sam, so much a part of my childhood, was not growing up along with me. In fact, he would
never
grow up, and I thought about that a lot on those summer evenings as I swung gently in the porch swing, back and forth through the sultry air, suspended.

In August, I went to Memphis for a week to visit Dixie, whose house turned out to be like Tara in
Gone With the
Wind
, only bigger, and whose mother turned out to drink sherry all day long. I came back to find Mama out of the hospital already, much improved by shock treatments, and another surprise—a baby-blue Chevrolet convertible, used but great-looking, in the driveway. My father handed me the keys.

“Here, honey,” he said, and then he hugged me tight, smelling of sweat and tobacco. “We’re so proud of you.” He had traded a man a combine or something for the car.

So I drove back to school in style, and my junior year went smoothly until Donnie announced that her sister Susannah, now at Pine Mountain Junior College, was going to Dartmouth for Winter Carnival, to visit a boy she’d met that summer. Susannah just
couldn’t wait
to look up Bubba.

Unfortunately this was not possible, as I got a phone call that very night saying that Bubba had been kicked out of school for leading a demonstration against the war. Lily, who had become much more political herself by that time, jumped up from her desk and grabbed my hand.

“Oh, no!” she shrieked. “He’ll be drafted!” The alarm that filled our study room was palpable—as real as the mounting body count on TV—as we stared white-faced at each other.

“Whatever will he do now?” Donnie was wringing her hands.

“I don’t know,” I said desperately. “I just don’t know.” I went to my room—a single, this term—and thought about it. It was clear that he would have to do something, something to take him far, far away.

But Bubba’s problem was soon to be superseded by Melissa’s. She was pregnant, really pregnant, and in spite of all the arguments we could come up with, she wanted to get married and have the baby. She wanted to have lots of babies, and one day live in the big house on the Battery that her boyfriend would inherit, and this is exactly what she’s done. Her life has been predictable and productive. So violent in his college days, Melissa’s husband turned out to be a model of stability in later life. And their first child, Anna, kept him out of the draft.

As she got into her mother’s car to leave, Melissa squeezed my hand and said, “Keep me posted about Bubba, and don’t worry so much. I’m sure everything will work out all right.”

It didn’t.

Bubba burned his draft card not a month later and headed for Canada, where he lived in a commune. I didn’t hear from him for a long time after that, tangled up as I was by then in my affair with Dr. Pierce.

D
R
. P
IERCE WAS A FIERCE, BLEAK, MELANCHOLY MAN
who looked like a bird of prey. Not surprisingly, he was a Beckett scholar. He taught the seminar in contemporary
literature that I took in the spring of my junior year. We read Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O’Connor, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon, among others. Flannery O’Connor would become my favorite, and I would do my senior thesis on her work, feeling a secret and strong kinship, by then, with her dire view. But this was later, after my affair with Dr. Pierce was over.

At first I didn’t know what to make of him. I hated his northern accent, his lugubrious, glistening dark eyes, his all-encompassing pessimism. He told us that contemporary literature was absurd because the world was absurd. He told us that the language in the books we were reading was weird and fractured because true communication is impossible in the world today. Dr. Pierce told us this in a sad, cynical tone full of infinite world-weariness, which I found both repellent and attractive.

I decided to go in and talk to him. I am still not sure why I did this—I was making good grades in his course, I understood everything. But one blustery, unsettling March afternoon I found myself sitting outside his office. He was a popular teacher, rumored to be always ready to listen to his students’ problems. I don’t know what I meant to talk to him about. The hour grew late. The hall grew dark. I smoked four or five cigarettes while other students, ahead of me, went in and out. Then Dr. Pierce came and stood in the doorway. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He looked tired, but not nearly as old as he did in class, where
he always wore a tie. Now he wore jeans and a blue work shirt, and I could see the dark hair at his neck.

“Ah,” he said in that way of his that rendered all his remarks oddly significant. “Ah! Miss Christian, is it not?”

He knew it was. I felt uncomfortable, like he was mocking me. He made a gesture; I preceded him into his office and sat down.

“Now,” he said, staring at me. I looked out the window at the skittish, blowing day, at the girls who passed by on the sidewalk, giggling and trying to hold their skirts down. “
Miss Christian
,” Dr. Pierce said. Maybe he’d said it before. I looked at him.

“I presume you had some reason for this visit,” he said sardonically.

To my horror, I started crying. Not little ladylike sniffles, either, but huge groaning sobs. Dr. Pierce thrust a box of Kleenex in my direction, then sat drumming his fingers on his desk. I kept on crying. Finally I realized what he was drumming: the
William Tell
overture. I got tickled. Soon I was crying and laughing at the same time. I was still astonished at myself.

“Blow your nose,” Dr. Pierce said.

I did.

“That’s better,” he said. It was. He got up and closed his office door, although there was no need to do so, since the hall outside was empty now. Dr. Pierce sat back down and leaned across his desk toward me. “What is it?” he asked.

But I still didn’t know what it was. I said so, and apologized. “One thing, though,” I said. “I’d like to complain about the choice of books on our reading list.”

“Aha!” Dr. Pierce said. He leaned back in his chair and made his fingers into a tent. “You liked Eudora Welty,” he said. This was true; I nodded. “You liked
Lie Down in Darkness
,” he said. I nodded again.

“But I just
hate
this other stuff!” I burst out. “I just hated
The End of the Road
, I hated it! It’s so depressing.”

He nodded rapidly. “You think literature should make you feel good?” he asked.

“It used to,” I said. Then I was crying again. I stood up. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

Dr. Pierce stood up, too, and walked around his desk and came to stand close to me. The light in his office was soft, gray, furry. Dr. Pierce took both my hands in his. “Oh, Miss Christian,” he said. “My very dear, very young Miss Christian, I know what you mean.” And I could tell, by the pain and weariness in his voice, that this was true. I could see Dr. Pierce suddenly as a much younger man, as a boy, with a light in his eyes and a different feeling about the world. I reached up and put my hands in his curly hair and pulled his face down to mine and kissed him fiercely, in a way I had never kissed anybody. I couldn’t imagine myself doing this, yet I did it naturally. Dr. Pierce kissed me back. We kissed for a long time while it grew completely dark outside, and then he locked the door and turned back to me. He
sighed deeply, almost a groan—a sound, I felt, of regret—then unbuttoned my shirt. We made love on the rug on his office floor. Immediately we were caught up in a kind of fever that lasted for several months—times like these in his office after hours, or in the backseat of my car parked by Goshen Lake, or in cheap motels when I’d signed out to go home.

Nobody suspected a thing. I was as good at keeping secrets as I was at making up lies. Plus, I was a campus leader, and Dr. Pierce was a married man.

He tried to end it that June. I was headed home, and he was headed to New York, where he had a fellowship to do research at the Morgan Library.

“Charlene—” Dr. Pierce said. We were in public, out on the quadrangle right after graduation. His wife walked down the hill at some distance behind us, with other faculty wives. Dr. Pierce’s voice was hoarse, the way it got when he was in torment (which he so often was, which was one of the most attractive things about him. Years later, I’d realize this). “Let us make a clean break,” he sort of mumbled. “Right now. It cannot go on, and we both know it.”

We had reached the parking lot in front of the chapel; the sunlight reflected off the cars was dazzling.

Dr. Pierce stuck out his hand in an oddly formal gesture. “Have a good summer, Charlene,” he said, “and good-bye.”

Dr. Pierce had chosen his moment well. He knew I wouldn’t make a scene in front of all these people. But I
refused to take his hand. I rushed off madly through the parked cars to my own and gunned it out of there and out to the lake, where I parked on the bluff above Donnie’s cabin, in the exact spot where Dr. Pierce and I had been together so many times. I sat at the wheel and looked out at the lake, now full of children on a school outing. Their shrill screams and laughter drifted to me thinly, like the sounds of birds in the trees around my car. I leaned back on the seat and stared straight up at the sun through the trees—just at the top of the tent of green, where light filtered through in bursts like stars.

B
UT
I
COULDN’T GIVE HIM UP, NOT YET, NOT EVER
.

I resolved to surprise Dr. Pierce in New York, and that’s exactly what I did, telling my parents I’d gone on a trip to Virginia Beach with friends. I got his summer address from the registrar’s office. I drove up through Richmond and Washington, a seven-hour drive. It was crazy and even a dangerous thing to do, since I had never been to New York. But at last I ended up in front of the brownstone in the Village where Dr. Pierce and his wife were subletting an apartment. It was midafternoon and hot; I had not imagined New York to be so hot, hotter even than McKenney, Virginia. I was still in a fever, I think. I rang the doorbell, without even considering what I would do if his wife answered. But nobody answered. Nobody was home. Somehow, this
possibility had not occurred to me. I felt exhausted. I leaned against the wall and then slid down it, until I was sitting on the floor in the vestibule. I pulled off my panty hose and stuffed them into my purse. They were too hot. I was too hot. I wore a kelly-green linen dress; I’d thought I needed to be all dressed up to go to New York.