The Name of the World (9 page)

On the twenty-ninth I drove Ted home from Dooley’s because he seemed to think that was best. He hadn’t thought so any of the other days he’d lurched to his feet after several drinks, announced he was hungry, and marched with a mechanical determination up the stairs. But today I drove him, and Eloise Sprungl, too. Ted insisted we go to his house first, however, because he wanted to show me something.

“Okay, what is it?” I asked when we’d pulled up in front of his big home.

“The car. I’m showing you the car.”

“Well, it’s an excellent car, Ted.”

I hadn’t driven a car in a long time, not in four years, plus three months. I liked driving the car.

“It’s a 1985 BMW three-oh-two or two-oh-three, or—do you want it?”

“Want it. To own?”

“It’s for sale.”

“What’s the price of one of these things?”

“Drive it.”

“I just did.”

“Drive it, man. Keep it a couple days. Let’s talk. It’s for sale and I want you to have it and it’s for sale.”

Ted’s home was made of red brick. It had a small entry with white pillars, and a semicircle drive, also small, but there they were, the entry and the drive, saying, “This wants to be a mansion.” To the side stood Ted’s blond ten-year-old son in a white T-shirt and white shorts, puffing flagrantly with large gestures on a cigarette that wasn’t actually burning. The player of the lute. Ted got out scolding and laughing. He grabbed his son’s cigarette and tossed it aside and it bounced on the tight green crew cut of the lawn. Together they went into the house.

I held the steering wheel and tromped the accelerator of my new car. The decision was made as soon as the suggestion. I put off admitting it to Ted or even to myself, but the car was mine.

I took Eloise to her place across town. On the way I asked her if she’d been getting a lot of painting done, and she told me not much. “The catering’s slack, and then I paint less. For some reason I work harder when I’m working harder. I’m practically on vacation. I couldn’t keep up with any business anyhow. There’s nobody experienced around to help me but Phil and Flower.”

“That would be Flower Cannon maybe.”

“Yes. She’s—you know her. Have you had her?”

“Hey. Eloise.”

“As a student, Mike.”

“We’re acquainted. I don’t think she’s interested in history.”

“No, I wouldn’t think so. This summer she’s the mad cellist. They’re getting together some kind of chamber group, I don’t know. This is my place. What do you think of this contraption?” She meant the car.

“It’s fine. I haven’t driven in years. Anything’s going to feel funny.”

“A BMW can’t feel
that
funny. How many miles? Ah, plenty.” She was leaning over and peering at the odometer.

“If I don’t wreck it by tomorrow, I guess I’ll buy it.”

“Buy it now! The asshole’s drunk!” She kissed my cheek and got out.

“Do you run into Flower much, or not?” I asked her out the window.

“Flower? No.” She both squinted and leered now. She had a limber face! “Are you after her?”

“After her? Wow. You’re frank as hell, aren’t you?”

“Usually I’d warn a young girl away from the prof. But in this case it’s you who’d better take warning, pal.” She leaned down and spoke with burnt tobacco and peppermint schnapps on her breath. “I
am
your pal, you know. In the end it’s the likes of us who’ll be stuck with each other.” She stood up and addressed the population generally: “You’ll end up marrying me, the Froggy Bitch with too many cats and a drinking problem every summer! And you’ll thank God!

“At least you’ll have a ritzy car!” she called after me as I drove away.

I had a vivid and disturbing dream that night that sent me out of my bed and down to the kitchen in my bathrobe to putter distractedly there until dawn. I think to recount your dreams is to bore the entire world, and I don’t normally even trouble myself to recollect mine. But since it’s developed, I think we can agree, that the knots in this line, the handholds, are those moments having to do with Flower Cannon, I’ll tell about this one. I’m following Flower Cannon through bureaucratic hallways—the sort of place you find yourself in from time to time with a form in your hand, looking for an office where someone will take this thing and make sense of it, but I had no document, I had only this vague feminine figure somewhere ahead of me as a reason for my wandering. She disappeared in her white garb through a door halfway along a corridor. I now understood that this was a hospital, understood without having wondered, in the state of senility common to the dreaming mind. I followed her through the same door and walked out
onto a glaring stage before a vast, shadowy audience of students. My quarry—yes? or my grail?—lay naked on a gurney while a doctor pointed his finger at her breasts and vagina and lectured unintelligibly. I didn’t belong here. My shame was like a child’s. I woke up sweating and chilled with panic. Instantly the words Ted MacKey had sung that afternoon came back:

As I’ve said, dreams are nonsense. But this one was a lot like something that actually happened the very next day. Around four that afternoon I was at the supermarket picking up a few items I probably didn’t need urgently. (I like wandering the aisles and coming up with a couple of days’ menu, just improvising. Then I let the stuff rot at home while I have myself fed in restaurants.) I was standing in the checkout lane reading the headlines of
Midnight
and
Globe
and the
National Enquirer,
trying not to take to heart the messages of the tabloid press: The mighty are fallen; glamor equals misery; the innocent shall be raped and killed. And then I saw Flower Cannon, hunched and straight-armed, shoving along a shopping cart.

She was all dressed up in a black-and-white pantsuit with pads that gave her sharp shoulders. Ankle-high white booties on her feet. The first strong impression was that of a crew member in a science-fiction tale. I waited just outside the
store, hoping to say hi, but she came out the other exit. I trailed her through the parking lot and called her name, but she didn’t acknowledge this man in a baking blacktop car park, brown paper bag of groceries dangling at his side in a single-handed grip, shouting, “Flower! Flower!”

I stood watching while she got aboard her hatchback, and then I went to my new used German and followed her. I was living last night’s dream, only in a setting not of hallways but of shimmering black streets.

Flower wasn’t going fast. I could have pulled alongside and signaled, but I didn’t. We went about a mile out the Old Highway and then left onto a narrow concrete road that shot west with never a turning through fields of alfalfa, fields of barley, fields of knee-high rows of corn.

I kept the windows down. The world was mute and pungent, brilliantly green. A few miles along Flower turned left again into the gravel lot of a gray one-storey building and parked among a lot of other cars gathered together in the midst of this flat vastness. Nothing else to see but a distant pair of concrete grain elevators standing above the horizon. Every small sound came up crisp and then the breeze took it far away, the small steady wind across the crust of the world, the click of her door and her heels and toes on the gravel. Flower glanced my way without curiosity as she headed into the place.

It was a cheap structure almost on the order of a mobile home, but much larger inside than it had seemed. A wide hallway went either way out of a foyer where scores of
people stood around without having to crowd. A sense of offices, meeting rooms, classrooms down institutional corridors. Directly ahead, double doors opened onto a chamber big enough, from what I could see, to accommodate hundreds. I thought I glimpsed church pews. Folks were wandering inside there to sit. I spotted Flower easily among all the farmers and the farmers’ wives. She stood by the double doors in her black-and-white pantsuit, maybe a bit harlequinesque but very stylish and expensive looking, talking in sign language with a young boy about sixteen. He must have been a deaf boy. I was fascinated. Without voices to help them they used whatever they had, both their faces animated, exploding with emotion, while the quick lively gestures shot down their arms and out their fingers; they worked at it like silent-film actors. And suddenly, reminded of the old silent films, I was struck with an understanding of the empty peace the boy inhabited. He had a thin, elegant face, blond hair, blue eyes, clear complexion. None of the erupting skin or awkwardness of adolescence.

The people seemed friendly. Wherever I looked I got a nod and a smile. In a minute I was approached by two men. One told me I was welcome. The other said they’d just begun their summer schedule here. Therefore, the first told me, this wasn’t Bible Study, as I’d probably expected.

I didn’t bother telling them I’d expected nothing, or anything but this: I’d stumbled into Sing Night. They were some sort of religious fellowship, and this building was their church. One of my hosts led me into the large room, which was filled
with many dozens of rustic wooden pews and fronted by a podium. We stood in the back while my companion, a man as small as I but more solid, in jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt, surveyed the place. One wide center aisle cut the room in half. The rows were filling up, women in the left-hand section, men in the right.

My host addressed me as a needy spirit, a groping soul. “We aren’t about doctrine so much. We
do
have a pamphlet, but we aren’t about doctrine, like I say. Did you get a—” The other man reappeared and handed me their pamphlet. “Here,” my friend said. “You’ll see in the first part right here where it says the important thing is—well, just take a look. The important thing is a—” He couldn’t get himself to say it. It made it seem all the more important, whatever it was.

We three sat down together on the men’s side of the room. I recognized that the crowd around me was one of those Protestant sects descended from Rhineland Anabaptists, like the Mennonites or the Amish. I might have seen any of them in town and never noticed, but in this large group it was plain they kept to a mode of dress. The women all wore skirts or dresses, rather long ones, and flat-heeled shoes and socks, and they kept their long hair in thick braids or pinned up. All of the men wore mustaches or beards. They’d picked me out right away, my face scraped bare, arms naked in my short sleeves, while theirs, both the women’s and men’s, buttoned at the wrists.

Very soon the rows were almost full. The voices quieted. We sat still, all facing forward. Nobody said a word. I heard no
coughing, no clearing of throats. Birdsong, very faint, carried in from the fields. For five minutes or even longer the wooden podium at the front of the room stood solitary, and we watched it.

Then a man, just a voice from the crowd, suggested, “Let us pray.”

The assembly couldn’t have hit the floor quicker if someone had opened up in their midst with a machine gun. With one motion, all leapt down onto their knees facing backward, elbows on the pews. I acted as decisively as they, yanked by a human gravity, blown off my tail to cower with my elbows on the seat and my forehead against my knuckles, shocked out of my wits.

Somebody said a prayer, but I heard none of it.

Then, as if nothing had happened, as if the multitude had never suffered this astonishing collapse, we climbed back onto our seats. Again we had silence.

After a while a man’s voice said, “Brother Fred, why don’t you pick out a hymn?” I have no idea how this voice’s owner, whom I couldn’t see, was suddenly given the confidence to speak up, or what made him choose Brother Fred to lead us.

A young man stood, struggled down along the pew past a series of knees, and went quickly up the aisle to open a hymnal on the podium. He looked like all the others, with long sideburns, almost sidelocks, and a mustache and a white shirt. Around me everybody was taking hymnals from slots in the pew-backs. “Number two thirty-eight?” he said. “How about
two thirty-eight?” The cover of the one I took up bore only the name
Friesland
. I found the hymn—

Their song astonished even more than their praying. They sang in multiple harmony, in a fullness and with a competence that didn’t seem studied, but perfectly natural, innate, all talent. I heard none of the usual bad voices, none of the people you want to go up to and ask, “Could you please not sing?”

I kept my eye on Flower Cannon. She sat in the middle of the women, as I in the middle of the men. I wished I’d sat close enough to distinguish her voice, and let me go stronger and admit that I painfully regretted not hearing her sing. She looked very different from the others around her. They wore skirts and she wore slacks. No other woman had her head uncovered, none let her hair fall free or bared her arms. Flower’s long red hair flowed down her back. Her blouse was sleeveless and her armpits stained with wide blotches of sweat. I made a note to myself—I had to get to a chemist someday, and ask if sweat is the same substance as tears.

The blond boy she’d been talking to sat two rows ahead of me. Once again it occurred to me—it more than occurred, the insight knocked the breath out of me—that the boy lived in a silence. Why on earth had he come? He sat quite still, completely self-possessed and perfectly alienated. For all he heard, he might have been in this chapel alone at midnight. Perhaps he was sensitive, in some tactile way, to an atmosphere thickened by hundreds of blended voices—how many? As the hymn swayed around me like wheat in a wind I found myself counting the house. Fourteen rows, about a dozen folks on each side of the aisle: nearly three hundred people, all singing beautifully. I wondered what it must sound like out in the empty green fields under the cloudless blue sky, how heartrendingly small even such a crowd of voices must sound rising up into the infinite indifference of outer space. I felt lonely for us all, and abruptly I knew there was no God.