The Spectator Bird (3 page)

“All right,” Ben said. “Some are. You don't have to start going to Arthur Murray. But I'm not kidding, old age is too God damned often self-inflicted. You don't want to turn into a hermit saving string and bottle tops and running the neighbor kids out of your yard. Come out more. Come to lunch with me.”

“Sure, any time.”

“I'll call you. And for God's sake don't go thinking yourself into any God damned wheel chair!” He reversed his cane and thumped me for emphasis on the breastbone and almost knocked me down.

“What the hell is that, a shillelagh?”

“Haven't I shown you that?” He held it up. To the shaft, which looked like cherry wood, had been fastened this big bone, obviously the ball of the ball and socket joint of some large animal. The knob was the size of a handball, with a frill of bone around its base and a two-inch shank of bone projecting from that and bound to the wood with a wide silver band. As the finial of the polished, elegant stick of wood the handle was grotesque, the sort of thing any self-respecting dog would bury and never go back to.

“That's my hip joint,” Ben said. “When I broke my hip, and they had me in the operating room, the last thing I said to the surgeon was, ‘Doctor, save me that joint, I want it' I'd walked on it for seventy-nine years and I damn well wanted to go on walking on it”

By then I was laughing and holding my nose and pushing away the cane that he held up in my face. The thing looked as if it might smell. “Couldn't you at least have left it out in the sun to bleach?” I said. “That's an awful brown untoothsome-looking bone.”

“That's a sound
bone. When I saw it I was proud, by God. Look at it. No spurs, no decalcification, no nothing. Except for that fall, it would have lasted me a lifetime.”

The white convertible eased into sight around the corner of the hill by Hammonds'. “Here comes Edith,” I said. “Do I act as if I know?”

He considered only a second. “I wouldn't. If it was me, I wouldn't hide it But she's like you, she'd rather go off by herself and grit her teeth.”

She pulled up, impassive behind the glasses, her flat cheeks looking deceptively young, her mouth fixed in the usual expression of remote and forgiving amusement. Ben opened the door, she slid over, he got in and threw the cane into the back seat “Think about it,” he said. “I'll call you for lunch one of these days.” They lifted their hands and drove off, and I sat down again on the bridge timbers.

I don't respond gladly when other people show a willingness to direct my life, routines, or feelings. Ben has a way of making me feel about fifteen years old, an age that appeals to me even less than sixty-nine. He never doubted himself in his life. He is one of those people, insufferable when you think about them, who have always been able to do exactly what they set out to do. The son of a China missionary, he came to California without a dollar, determined to become a doctor. He became one, a very good one, some people think a great one. Even yet, when he has all but quit practicing, people come from a long way off to be treated by him. He has doctored everybody from Admiral Nimitz to Angela Davis, he has more celebrities in his files than I have, and on more intimate terms. I have only read their manuscripts and taken them to lunch and prepared their contracts and advanced them money and bailed them out of difficulties. He has examined their prostates, or the equivalent.

Wanting money, he made it, made two or three million dollars. And give him credit, he practices what he preaches. When he built his big house in six hundred acres of foothills he didn't retire, he pulled the world out to him. It is about as secluded as Vandenberg Air Force Base. Two or three nights a week his Chinese couple serve dinner to twenty or so people, the kind of people who have been everywhere and done everything. From his little vineyard Ben makes every year a thousand bottles of extraordinary Cabernet Sauvignon. He is a director in a half dozen Peninsula electronics firms, he has served on a half dozen presidential commissions, he owns vineyards in Sonoma and ranches in Mendocino County, and he collects things—friends, books, money, limericks, dirty stories—the way an air filter collects lint.

Also, I was thinking as I sat on my splintery 8×8 beam, he is one of the few men I know thoughtful enough to go down with Edith Patterson while she received her husband's death sentence, or take a few minutes to read the lab tests of Joe Allston, a crybaby former patient, and make a special trip out to calm his mind.

Grit my teeth, did I? The hell I did. I complained by withdrawal and irritability and silence. Ten minutes with Ben Alexander and I was resolving to quit being a sissy about growing old.

Eventually the mailman's red, white, and blue truck came in, and the mailman, as cheerful as if he had been on time, handed me out a little bundle. Most of the letters, as usual, were addressed to Boxholder or Resident. Those that were not seemed to be appeals. That is another symptom of retirementitis, the way the mail decreases in amount and significance. I put the bundle in my right-hand pocket and walked back up the lane, reading as I walked, and transferring the read items to the pocket on the other side.

Enter the unexpected—and I dislike the unexpected, as the man said, unless I have had a chance to prepare for it. The fourth item I took out of my pocket was a postcard, closely written, and forwarded from our New York address of nine years ago. At the bottom of the hill, at the last edge of sun, in the smell of crushed eucalyptus buttons, I stopped and read it.

The other side of the card was a color photograph, taken from a high place, of a neat red-roofed village set between fields and woods at the edge of a tame sea. A boat harbor extended masonry arms into the water beyond warehouses and sheds. A little green island was afloat offshore.

Bregninge. I am related to it, or once thought I was. I know that estate, which includes two other villages, the harbor, the warehouses, a thousand acres or so of planted pinewoods, orchards, fields, and an English park modeled on that of Warwick Castle, where peacocks parade around the lawns under oaks that anywhere else in Denmark would have been cut down a century ago. I know the castle, too, a real slot, none of your mere thirty-bedroom manor houses, and I know some of its history, which is enough to put your pyloric caecum into spasm.

So that was where she ended. I was not really surprised. That was settled on Midsummer Night twenty years ago. She would now be sixty, Edith Patterson's age. A quiet life, looking after a helpless husband, in her one available safe place. She might live to be my age—ten more years of ebb—or Ben Alexander's, twenty. She might live, like her grandmother, to be nearly a hundred.

When I got to the house, Ruth was sunning in the protected front patio. “Isn't it a funny day?” she said. “It's so chilly when the sun goes under, and so warm when it's out.”

“Bolts and jolts. What did Edith want?”

“She can't play for the shut-ins for a while. She and Tom are going somewhere.”

No confidences, then. So be it.

“When do you want lunch?”

“Not right away, I guess. Can we wait till one? I'd like to go back down and work a little more.”

“Fine,” she said, pleased, and took the mail I handed her—without the postcard—and turned herself to pondering the needs of Boys' Town, the NAACP, and the Association for the American Indian.

I went down to the study and rummaged around in boxes until I found the diary I had kept, away back when I was sick and stuck in the sand and trying to winch myself out. It was written in three stenographic notebooks bound together with rubber bands that snapped when I stretched them. Thumbing the pages, I saw names I had entirely forgotten, places I didn't ever recall visiting, references to feelings I would have sworn I never felt. It was like a letter from a dead Joe Allston to the one who survives, and it dealt—I knew it did before I read it, that's why I went looking for it—with existential problems: Who am I? How to be? What is the meaning of everything?

I started to read from the beginning, and it began to come back. Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old. geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years. When you hand him a problem he doesn't come back with a cartful and dump it before you, a jackpot of instant retrieval. He finds one thing, which reminds him of another, which leads him off to the annex, which directs him to the east wing, which sends him back two tiers from where he started. Bit by bit he finds you what you want, but like his boss who seems to be under pressure to examine his life, he takes his time.

Also, what he brings is not necessarily pleasant. It is a little like taking the top off the jar and letting the tarantula out, and not too unlike opening a grave. Alas, poor Allston. I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, but now strangely chapfallen.

Lunch interrupted me before I got past the first notebook. In the afternoon there were errands in town, some plants to be set out, some firewood to cut—routines, I realize, with which I fence my life in away from the mankillers. Then a shower, then a drink, then Cronkite like a ghostly cricket creakeen where a house was burned, then dinner, then the dishes, and finally the bedroom, which is where we really live. There, Ruth in bed and I in the big chair, two old parties in a warm well-lighted room, with the television standing by in case there should be something on worth watching, and the rest of the house dark and turned down in deference to that new American phenomenon, the shortage, we settled down for the evening, without interruption except when one or the other of us threw off old Catarrh, the Siamese, who at the age of ninety or so by human standards needs warmth too, and loves to creep up under your chin to sleep, and is never happier than when he is lying on your book.

Ruth is quiet and contented with her reading, but I am not. Until recently—until, in fact, the machinery began to show signs of wear—the Joe Allston sitting there reading the diary of his predecessor has been pretending to be Marcus Aurelius, or the Cicero of “De Senectute”: stoic philosopher surprised by nothing, accepting everything, valuing only friendship, abstract integrity, and the cup that warms.
Nil admirari
and
memento mori
and all that. Take gratefully any pleasures the world provides, but don't curse God when they fail. Nobody in the universe ever promised you anything. Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of a life amount not to wisdom but to scar tissue and callus.

But it doesn't work indefinitely. Crucifixion can be discussed philosophically until they start driving the nails. Look at the way I was grumbling and whimpering down there with Ben this morning. The symptoms of failing vigor, the oncoming of age, have put me right back to where I was in 1954-which, come to think of it, was about where I was in 1924. Young, middle-aged, or getting old, Joe Allston has always been full of himself, uncertain, dismayed, dissatisfied with his life, his country, his civilization, his profession, and himself. He has always hunted himself in places where he has never been, he has always been trying to thread some needle with a string that was raveled at both ends. He has always been hungry for some continuity and assurance and sense of belonging, but has never had ancestors or descendants or place in the world. Little orphan Joe, what a sad case.

His unappeased presence in the diary and in the big chair makes the Joe Allston of recent years, the one the neighbors here think they know, look less like Marcus Aurelius than like a prosy Polonius. The stoicism he has pretended to is about as impressive as a telephone recording. His questions have never been answered and his hunger never satisfied. I only thought there had been some sort of accommodation because the spiritual epidermis, like the physical hide, thickens where it is rubbed.

There is even a question if it thickens enough. From here, it is apparent that that Danish excursion was the most romantic quest since Parsifal's, sure to end in a bloody nose. If you forget caution and start through the dark woods toward the dark tower, you are exposed, vulnerable, without guidance, and guilty. It may have been a water rat I speared, but ugh, it sounded like a baby's shriek. As for the maiden in distress, and Astrid was one, the dragon ate her. Here it is on the postcard.