The Make Believers

One: IKE

I

Almost exactly a year before Dexter and Joanna brought him home the old man phoned Owen out of the blue from Boston.

Not a word for ten years nearly and then all at once, George Izlar, Owen, hearty and cheerful, and chatting on of this and that, nothing to warrant a long-distance call—springtime in the Garden, a boat trip on the Charles (upstream from the rectangles of science to the blue cupolas of letters), a sermon at a Unitarian Church-no How have you been? or What’s new with you? though he did pause once to send his love to Louisa and the children, the children with children of their own, which he knew very well if he put his mind to it.

Owen sat there half listening, half absorbed in gazing at the picture in the other room that belonged to George and that his voice put a spotlight on, Leonard’s wedding present to G & M Izlar, for a Happy Marriage—gazing at the yellows and whites in it (pears and plates and table napkins and Leonard in white in a corner, the L reaching out under the rest with some of Leonard’s old dash), and at the yellows and whites that weren’t in it but only in the summer it was painted, the yellow sand at the Island and the bands of surf, sunflowers and blowing white towels, his mother’s gold wedding ring against the starched cotton of floor-length skirts, and Margaret Izlar’s too when she had adopted cotton, falling in with their Southern ways, the brass buttons and crossed-cannon insignia of the officers in white from the Fort. And at Leonard himself of course, with his two-inch pencil and his somehow innocent long-toothed smile. Draw something, Half-uncle Leonard (he preferred that, if kinship had to be in it). Draw him something, Len, says Margaret; anything. And his mother, who must have been through it before, You’d better not let him. Oh Virginia! A hand? says Leonard. Now Leonard! Oh Mamma, what’s the matter drawing a hand? Leonard already pulling the pencil down the pad, a certain delicate alertness in the cock of his wrist that didn’t go with his over-all hit-or-missness, just lines, nothing you could recognize, and then out of nowhere a hand, from the back, two fingers tapering down. And as they were exclaiming, two loops near the top and a V in the middle, and Margaret was laughing and Owen was staring and Virginia was crying, I knew it! and snatching the paper with a fine 1907 modesty. And George was saying, He can turn anything into a woman, arm round his new imported-from-Boston Margaret, which Owen believed (then and perhaps now). Though he wouldn’t do it again for all the prodding-had probably been spoken to—laughing and rubbing his palm over the prodder’s summer-shaved head. And soon gone, New York or Paris or Rome, somewhere off in the pink clouds, leaving them there in the tame world of tides and sea biscuits and oleanders and mosquito netting and officers in white standing yellow-braided sabers in the hotel hatrack, the Atlantic Beach Hotel—the tame world that didn’t stay tame very long.

He kept wanting to tell George Izlar he was looking at Leonard’s picture (Keep it for me, Owen, suddenly teary-eyed, her voice low and not for the others, the whole thing inexplicable to him, leaving it behind when she liked it so much, and the going back to Boston in itself); but George wasn’t easy to interrupt, sounding hardly any older than before, a little more deliberate, more willful maybe, Owen half-consciously trying to add up how old he was from his being, he thought, ten or twelve years older than Leonard who was fifteen older than Owen and coming out with the incredible sum of plus or minus seventy-six.

Then he brought Owen abruptly down to earth with a drawn-out by-the-way sort of E-er and My plane gets in around ten, Owen.

Gets in where, George? seeing it but hoping he didn’t, and George said, enjoying it, Don’t meet me. I’ll take the limo straight to the Oglethorpe. Oglethorpe! Your’re coming home?

It was the right bowled-over response and he could all but see the one-cheeked old grin. I’m leaving here in about five minutes, giving it another turn of the screw for offhandedness. I’ll be having supper with some colleagues at the Hopkins and catching an early flight out in the morning. I’ve engaged the Presidential Suite, I’ll be seeing so many people. Coming and going all day. It’ll be like Grand Central Station.

He had said he would never come back—that day in their apartment in a no longer quite first-grade section of Beacon Street, George in his bow tie, the thin teacup of good china that had come to Margaret from her mother in his clean doctor’s fingers like a butterfly, Margaret smiling at the two of them or at the Georgia years they took her back to (she had asked, alone for a minute, about Leonard: You have to love him, Owen, because you can’t like him), Anna the Siamese on the windowsill against their view of the Basin. Owen told him he thought he had said he would never come back and he said, Oh, ‘never’ is a dangerous word, Owen! his laugh rattling down the wires then breaking off as he added in a different voice, factual, no self-pity in it yet somehow softened, I’ll be my myself. You heard about Margaret.

Owen said he wrote him at the time and he uttered a vague Yes that might have referred to the letter or might have been a repetition, aside for his own ears, that Yes he would be by himself. In November. Up at North Stonefield. Lobar pneumonia. She was only sixty-two. The most wonderful woman that ever lived. Then, putting it by, I want to see you, Owen. All of you. Tell me about Leonard, is he out of the woods?

He told him Leonard was better, was home now, got out in the yard—speaking as if he knew more about Leonard than he did; the truth was, except for a visit to the hospital he had hardly seen Leonard in a year.

I’ve wired Leonard I’m coming, Owen. I want to see Leonard. It surprised him a little. He mumbled something and George went on, "He is seeing people?"

Owen said, Oh yes, he was quite himself, up to a point. Trying to get one of the nurses to pose for him the other day (he hadn’t thought of it before but she was blond and, with her uniform, there were the yellows and whites again).

Without a stitch, I dare say, cutting it short at what must have been his doorbell or a horn because he said, Here’s my cab, Owen. A-demain, and was gone—leaving a scatter of questions behind him. A casual visit? A day or two with old friends, old memories? Or was it an out-and-out return? at loose ends now, a widower in his wife’s town, the old quotation perhaps still haunting him that he had tossed out when Owen chided him for quitting Fredericksville: ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world, and something about sailing on beyond the western stars until you die; no strong ties to Boston, not much practice, as Owen had put it together, an office with a tenth-floor view up the river but no patients the morning Owen had stopped in—unless he counted himself—no nurse, no calls (one call, an invitation to address some non-medical gathering which he accepted while fumbling for his calendar, he liked that sort of thing), having ushered Owen in with a large introductory gesture and Come in, Owen! Come into The Thoughtery!—which for years meant nothing to him then suddenly developed a lineage of its own when he happened on, Scene: In the background are two houses, that of Strepsiades and that of Socrates, the Thoughtery. Margaret picked out my curtains, with her usual good taste, then with a wave at a dictating machine, I’m talking a book.

But visit or move, he could hardly have hit on a worse time. Mary’s wedding scarcely ten days off; Louisa up to her ears; Pete intent on a business deal he ought to be talked out of (if Owen could figure how); his own trip—and the preparations for it—to Atlanta on Monday; and beyond all that this tightening urge of his to get back to what he had meant to do with his life before it was too late (if, contrary to George, it already wasn’t).—Idle regrets, with George already on his way.

Or a cabload of Georges. George of Fredericksville and the Island, the honored doctor, hale and debonair in his loose white suits and Margaret-made ties that he wore the way some men wear a wedding ring or carry a snapshot of the family in an inside pocket; George in the twilight of the train shed with Margaret. We’ll miss you, George. ’Tis not too late and the rest of it (suspecting, perhaps, it was). Some of the Georges hardly older than Pete himself, most of them slow-moving and not moving at random. Exercise? Put your feet up, Owen. Exercise is a fetish of Western Man. You’re too much of a Presbyterian. You want to do it the hard way, a George of about fifty to Owen’s twenty-five. And often irritating. You have the missionary spirit. Like your Aunt Lizzie, shaking the nice red dust of Georgia off her feet and going to China to save the heathen. My God, Owen, the heathen don’t want to be saved! He likes it being a heathen, laughing until the phlegm rose in his throat—down the straight white concrete to the Island at his usual breakneck clip, a good part of the way in second speed or with the brake half on because he was talking and was contemptuous of motor cars anyhow, hardly stopping for hours until he swung up to the cottage with a horn-blast and a high salute to wife and guests and off the road into the powder sand up to the hub caps; giving it a series of thundering spins in forward and reverse then getting out and gazing at it puzzled and a little hurt, the radiator bubbling and a smell of scorched rubber in the salty wind. Leave it there! as you might throw away an empty cigarette pack, Margaret, apparently less surprised than he, shaking her head and reaching for the crank of the wall phone to call help from the village. And your Uncle Ike, he’s a missionary too, the biggest kind, talking about him to his face in the third person. He could have been a missionary in Congress if he’d stayed there where he belonged. But no, that wasn’t missionary enough for a Woodruff, (Ike and his widowed sister Tessie down for a week with Margaret and the boy—Dexter Shaw Izlar, for her father, eight or so), the wind cooling everybody on one side and leaving the other side wet. Retrievers. Woodruffs make fine retrievers. They like to run off and bring something back. Ike laughing and asking him, What about the Izlardog? Izlars? Oh, they’re big friendly dogs, a little like St. Bernards. They like to rescue climbers, rocking the wicker chair in the wide dim seaside hallway, the sunlight on the ceiling in a carom off the beach, cotton trousers as shapeless by then as pajamas. Miss Margaret, couldn’t you fix us dogs a pitcher of that good Boston lemonade?…

2

The room clerk wanted the name spelled and Owen spelled it (the years having made a clean sweep of Izlar in Fredericksville). He was a little late—in fact had stared at posters in the travel agency downstairs until he was, still half annoyed at the old man; phoning him that morning at what he thought of (remembering Boston) as The Paintery: Now when am I going to see you, Owen? I’m getting my day lined up here. And when Owen said he would come right out, Oh, I’m afraid we can’t do that, with a chuckle at such innocence. The morning’s full. Everybody will be coming by. Let’s see. I’ve got my pad here. I’ll put you down for quarter to six. Make it twenty to six, Owen. I’ll probably be roped in for dinner somewhere and I want to see as much of you as I can. The clerk said, Three-o-one and two, I’ll see if he’s in, motioning at a pink house-phone. He answered as Owen lifted the receiver.

There were voices in his Presidential Suite, or words, a continuous stream of them, and he said, George, are you free? This is Owen. He thought it was quite possible the old man would suggest waiting in the lobby until the visitors thinned out but he said, Come on up! You’re late. And it did sound as if the party had been going a while.

Everything was so quiet when the elevator let him off he wondered if he had heard the wrong room number, not listening, expecting to find his way by the welcome-home chatter, the star’s-dressing-room note, comings and goings of aged doctor pals and their families, maybe a sprinkling of younger ones, students under him, maybe a few patients with long memories—no family of his own in Fredericksville; unless the years they had both descended from created a sort of consanguinity, which might well make him George’s next of kin.

But the door of 301 was hospitably wide open and George was lying out on one of the beds in the twilight, no lamps on, the microphone of a dictating machine in his lap. There were no voices now, the air so empty he could hear the afternoon traffic on the grade; he called his name and George said, Come in, come in, rearranging the pillows behind his shoulders. I was just playing back some ideas I’ve been having about chastity.

Chastity! It made him think of the room clerk needing Izlar to be spelled.

I can’t read much nowadays, he said indifferently, flinging the microphone on the other bed with the machine in much the spirit of his Leave it there! when he went into the sand, so I dictate. I can look at the moon and I don’t see the old Roquefort cheese you see. I see a pair of pearly discs surrounded by lovely purple and green circles. I’ll go up to the Hopkins before long and they’ll leave me seeing nothing but what’s true.—Draw up a chair. That beautiful scent, can you smell it?

His windows opened east, high enough to look through the tops of the magnolias; no sun came in, though the points of some of the trees were sunlit and some of the bright creamy floppy flowers that reminded him of the panama hat George used to wear at the Island a hundred years ago. The heavy perfume floated in on a draft to the door. He said that beautiful smell set him thinking of Margaret who loved it, which led him to chastity. The important thing about chastity is it represents a standard of value, an Approved Solution. People will tell you that modern contrivances make chastity superfluous, but when you throw out a standard of value you’d better have another one ready to put in its place or you may get only the sort of liberation you get when you lose a button off your pants.

Owen said pants didn’t have buttons any more and he said, Mine do! with his lopsided grin. I see no sign the world is more joyous of heart on a diet of profligacy. Why, a woman’s ankles mean no more to you young people than the drumstick of a fried chicken. What must you think when you read of ‘Ino of the fair ankles’! Nobody ever heard of ‘Ino.’ "Or, ‘Shore’s wife hath a pretty foot’!—Draw up a chair.—When I was at college we came up for a three-hour final and we waited there for a sheaf of questions as long as your arm. There was only one ‘question.’ Criteria of value. Comment. Go in there, pour yourself some whiskey," waving at the sitting room and the table of bottles and glasses in neat glittering rows. A case of replenishments on the floor looked as untouched as the glasses.

Owen said he would get a drink and sit a few minutes by his window and enjoy the chastity—sit a few minutes and, he hoped, get round to saying what he had come to say without making too much of it.

I helped plant one of those trees. Old Malcolm Trafford planted it but the old man was ailing and the family had me standing out of sight in the audience ‘just in case,’ as we politely put it. He didn’t seem to have changed much, not much hair anyhow last time in Boston so you hardly noticed its being whiter; the light was too weak for details. A change in the way he moved perhaps, a minute faltering, a sway in his arm hanging up the microphone. The tie somehow reminded Owen of a glimpse of him once sure-footed on the steps of the tall building where he had his office by then, fifteen-fourteen, you can remember it by the birth of Vesalius. Dexter’s doing well, housemaster now, they seem to like him. I never see him, sorry to say; two or three days when his mother died, and on into other angles of it because they interested him. When he paused Owen said, I suppose you’ve been shaking hands all day, sorry before he finished saying it, with all the polished glasses in there sinking into the dusk.

George’s half-second silence was answer enough but he went on, A number of kind people have dropped by or phoned or sent messages, shying away, Owen thought, from nothing but what’s true (as who didn’t?). You can’t expect everybody to gather round at a moment’s notice. It was good of you to come in. I’d say stay and have dinner with me but I’m expecting a call from Leonard and I want to be able to fall in with anything he proposes. It sounded as if he might have been in touch with Leonard and Owen hoped he had; he had begun to think seeing Leonard was the whole point of the expedition, which otherwise seemed to have none. You’ve heard from Leonard then?

Not yet, not yet.—Tell me about yourself, Owen. When you were in Boston you spoke of selling your business; against, as I remember, your wife’s better judgment.

Owen said he hadn’t gone through with it; but he was moving toward it, he was painting again. And I’ll tell you something you won’t believe, laugh if you will. I’m a better painter than when I quit. He did laugh and Owen hedged a little; Not as much better as if I’d painted twenty years but—

George said he was laughing at Owen’s finding that so curious; if he had read William James, which everybody was too smart to do any more, he’d know you learned to ski in the summertime.

I’ve lost the years all right but I may have gained something too. It was the chance he had been waiting for to caution the old man—not the discreet physician but the old man of so many words—and he said, It’s rather on the q.t. at the moment. Not to panic the family.

Louisa doesn’t know you’re painting?

Yes, but not that I really mean it. Some lights were coming on in the city down there and he watched them for a few seconds, sorry he had got into it, wondering how to get out; it wasn’t ready yet for other ears, including George’s. If things go well, when I get further along—

The open door was opening wider and he saw what might be his rescuer standing in silhouette against the hall lights and he thought if this really was Leonard he would speak quickly, give him his chair and go; a little of Leonard went a long way and he had had his little.

There was a knock on the door frame then and George said, Leonard? thoughts jumping in the same direction. That you, Leonard?

It was a colored man, Owen saw now, quite tall even with the stoop in his shoulders, neatly dressed, necktie, cap in his hand; tight gray watch-spring hair. The coat was too big for him, with his long arms and probably buying the larger size to take care of the sleeve lengths. He said, Dr. George? the words on a peculiar smiling note.

George said, Who’s that? the fact of its not being Leonard somehow marking his voice. The Negro said, I reckon you don’t remember me, Dr. George.

Owen stood up, patted George’s shoulder, told him he would keep in touch; he nodded to the man in the door whom he couldn’t place though he felt he had seen him somewhere, maybe at somebody’s party, brought in to serve. In the hall he heard George say he didn’t reckon he did. Then suddenly, Unless you’re Jim.

This is Jim.

You don’t say!

This is Jim.

Well, I am damned. Draw up a chair.—He thought, well, at least there had been two in the welcoming throng at Grand Central.

Late sunshine struck across the tree trunks like the soft hammer of a xylophone and he could feel himself drawing to the light as you reach out toward a warmth when you are cold. He was cold—darkened, rather—and he knew why. A man coming back home, expecting to pick up loose ends, make connections again, he was too much like a man preparing to change his life after nearly twenty years, preparing to go back to where he had left off, inviting in old drives, old eagernesses, old dreams and purposes that might not be ready to gather round at a moment’s notice.—Listen, Owen, the other old voice was saying across the nearly twenty; Liquidate that business and you won’t get thirty cents on the dollar (old Newt Spell at a drug-store table a week after Peter’s funeral). If you go in there, in a year or two you can sell it as a going concern; then you can paint any damn ugly thing you want to. Year or two! It might take three or four, but you’d be independent for thirty or forty.…

Why hadn’t he sold in ’36? Or ’39 Or ’44?-painting on the side, a good bit the first year, less the second and third; not at all the fifteenth, when he glanced up and found he had a son in Lawrenceville and was thinking if he kept it running for six or eight more years Pete would have a good business career all set up for him. As if a young man would want something all set up and static and dead. Times were better. He could free himself now, to paint any damn ugly thing he wanted to. For a few years; subtracting eighteen from old Newt’s thirty or forty. Unless his welcome home should be as hollow as the one upstairs—which he wanted to forget, and the old man with it.

But Louisa said, What about George? and George and his dim room were in his eyes again.

If there was a used glass in there I couldn’t find it. Ashtrays are the giveaway. There wasn’t a cigarette butt in the place. Do you want to call him, ask him to supper?

He said no and meant it. What he wanted, he supposed, was to call him and get no answer; find he had been roped in for something. Gone out with Leonard.

He answered on the first ring.

Why don’t you come have a little supper with us— planning to say, if he hadn’t heard from Leonard and when he finished with Jim. Before he could say it George broke in with, I’d love to.

He was sitting on a step in the middle of the main entrance when Owen got there, sitting like a beggar, stick between his knees and such an abandoned look of sadness on his face Owen hardly knew him. The airport limousine was loading and there were scowls at his being very much in the way, a few exasperated grins, some knowing looks (that didn’t know), all matters of indifference to him; Owen cut in ahead of a taxi and called him and he shoved to his feet and came in a straight deliberate line, ignoring the taxi’s indignant horn, the porters, the passengers, the bustle, caring nothing for such chaff. I ain’t impressed by mere insignificance, he had said somewhere back in their interlocking years. In the car he cheered up again, said with a smile, You caught me on the stygian banks staying for waftage.

He lay out on their sofa with a pillow behind his neck, the tie under his chin (a different one, mauve now), sipping whiskey and talking about such for-God’s-sake things as moderation and friendship and courage, becoming and being. Owen here is a ‘becoming’ man. You’re smarter, Miss Louisa, you know how to ‘be,’ Owen tightening at what the old man might be getting into, then relaxing as he added in parenthesis, I have to talk, my dear young friends. It’s one of my afflictions. But as I used to tell Margaret, it’s better to bore hell out of everybody than sit in silence with the melancholy rising in your throat. And she would say, ‘Yes, George, it’s better to bore hell out of everybody,’ and she would laugh, sewing me another tie, cerise, indigo, magenta, heliotrope, all very beautiful.

He refused their dessert, asked for a liqueur instead—pronouncing it cure in the old way of Peter and Ike and the Major—and went on while they ate the apple tarts, Some people manage to acquire more immortality than others. You have to make it, as the good brothers made this beautiful green stuff. And the funny thing is you make it out of flowers too, largely that rare and aromatic flower virtue. In the long run sin don’t pay. Just as the Bible says. Owen said he couldn’t recall that particular verse and the old man laughed. You young people think you don’t believe in sin, but your bodies do. They know Too Much. Yes, pour me a little more; I don’t think it’s a sin yet and perhaps we may stumble on a happy thought.—No comment on the town, on who was living and who dead, no explanation of his looking in on them after so long; he was elsewhere, with his lovely purple and green circles.

When he was lying on the sofa again Owen brought some whisky and the first three glasses he put his hand on, only two of them matching, and Louisa said, Don’t use those, Owen. We’ve only two left, George; we had a dozen.

He said, Two left, in his dreamy way. And one of them will go before the other, staring at his hand, the staying-for-waftage stare, then starting to talk about Margaret, voice taking on the strong softness of his mention of her on the phone, a tenderness that was also bold, saying things Owen never would have said aloud but putting them in a way that made him feel the old man’s idea of what was speakable was better than his own. He said he loved her for the dangers they had passed—making it his by the change he gave it—loved the way she came down their stairs when the elevator wasn’t running, not the supple springing down of forty years before but picking her step through the upper lenses of her glasses, knees out, tread by tread. Because behind it were all the other stairs he had seen her descend, from the one at home where presumptuous-but-lonely Intern Izlar had appeared with an introduction to Dr. Shaw, a thoughtless descent, light-footed, light-hearted, through hotel stairs, hospital stairs, stairs in museums, theaters, steps on trains, ships, buses, planes, all the descents becoming less and less lovely to a stranger’s eye but more and more beautiful to his, more and more charged with the past he and she had made, with all the other descendings, until each movement and motion accumulated such a depth of life behind it that it shone like depths of water or colored glass with what was behind, and with the certainty of the boundaries drawing round it, of the steps being numbered that were still to be added and then the collection would be complete—

Pausing as if for a comma, then making it a full stop. And now you must call me a taxi and send me home, sitting up and gazing at Leonard’s picture as though he had recognized it earlier. How’d you get that? (as if Margaret hadn’t told him where it was. And he hadn’t asked).

Owen sidestepped an answer. It’s really yours, George. When you get back to Boston I’m going to ship it to you.

He squinted at it for a moment longer then got to his feet and turned away from it. Leave it there, like the car in the sand. Then, You know who that was, don’t you? Came in as you were going? That was Jim Bondy.

Jim Bondy?

Jim Bondy of Sharon Courthouse.

It was like a magician’s old-time sleight of hand in a vaudeville act, this into that, now into then—a pair of tricks, one after the other: first, George with so much past in tow, and now Bondy with more.

A grandson’s the pastry cook at the hotel, told him I was there. I said, ‘You mean you’re old enough to have grandchildren?’ and he said, ‘A hundred and nine.’ I said, ‘Go on! You’re not a hundred and nine, you just feel like it,’ and he said, ‘A hundred and nine grandchildren.’ Singers, dancers, high-hurdle runners. One’s a preacher here in town. One’s a history teacher in Atlanta, Ph.D. He held out his big hand to Louisa. "How many grandchildren do you have, Miss Louisa?—Good night to you both you have lengthened my days."

Gone then, or half gone; still partly there with the bags and bales of folded-away years he had brought with him like one of those Florida-bound Levantine peddlers of another day on his knees before Virginia and Margaret laying out choice linens and laces on the living-room rug with his chocolate-pencil fingers. Laying out the years for Owen and the lives in them being shaped by all the others, as if your life weren’t made of just its own heredity and environment but of all the ones it crossed. As if Owen’s wanting to break away to paint again had ancestor-motives in common with George’s breaking away to return to Boston; as if needing to paint in the first place were descended from Leonard’s needing to. And Jim Bondy there linking them all.

Not even a name to them that June setting out for the Island, children leaning from the day-coach windows to watch for Peter in his white suit and British moustache who at 12:36 with four minutes to spare would come in under the shed out of the sun like a seagull under a cloud shadow, sound vice-president in father-in-law’s sound business.…

II

Do you have the tickets, Peter? There’s a strange child got in among ours, Virginia. No, that’s just Owen with his new head-shave. Gracious me! Are you sure? There’s no barbershop on the Island, Peter. Yes, but even so. It’s hard on a man to see his son— All aboard, Mr. Woodruff, please sir. Very good, Captain Wilson. Get em in, Virginia.

And Captain Wilson with his punch, after a tactful interval, We stop forty minutes—punch, punch—for dinner at Sharon, Mr. Woodruff, swaying in the aisle like a sure-footed sailor. The Sharon Hotel sets a well-known table. I’ll be wiring ahead from Conners—punch, punch—how many to lay for.

We brought a lunch basket, Captain, thank you just the same, steadying his head to receive the tickets in his hatband.

But in the next car, on his way to the smoker (not that he usually had a cigar this time of day but travel with a wife, three children and a nurse set one thinking of tobacco), a voice said, Peter! and he turned around to a tall young man—younger than himself anyway—bouncing out of his seat, face so beaming, so self-satisfied, so un-George Izlarlike that for a second even with the glasses and the sandy moustache Peter hardly knew him. And the young woman by the window confused him further; George wasn’t married. Then, of course George was married! Three weeks ago in Boston. George! And this is Mrs. Izlar.

She held out her hand before George could pronounce Margaret, a dark-haired girl with earnest brown eyes and a hat as different from Fredericksville hats as her voice from Fredericksville voices when she said George had spoken of them, You and—‘Virginia,’ I think? smiling, but less of a smile than the South was used to for such a moment. He said something about hoping she would like the South and she said she hoped so too (as if, incredibly, not quite sure), adding with a laugh that anyway she loved the smells. The magnolias wake me up in the morning.

Making way for Wilson’s steamy blue shoulders he remembered the hotel and he said, Just a minute, Captain Wilson. I’m giving a welcome-home dinner for Dr. and Mrs. Izlar at the Sharon Hotel. George said, Perhaps I’d better see if I have enough bicarbonate in my grip for everybody, and her laugh was low-pitched, spontaneous, fond. Darling, what a way to accept an invitation!

They hardly saw Conners, or no one did but Peter (with a glimpse of Wilson in the dispatcher’s office wiring how many to lay for), Margaret and Virginia in the seat ahead under a swarm of woman-words that darted about like swallows, George more attentive to the Boston voice than anything Peter said. He had about decided George would never marry, not much time for sociability, hospital-to-office-to-sickroom, a coming man, though now and then he broke away and you saw him, an extra at a picnic, a reliable stag at a german, a priceless Pooh-bah in one winter’s Mikado. And now all of a sudden married. And most handsomely. Her father’s one of the chief surgeons at Mass General, Dexter Shaw. I interned there, you know. Peter murmured, Margaret Shaw, and George said, Margaret Shaw Izlar, with an infatuated laugh.

Peter patted his thick arm. Well, the best of everything to both of you, George. And (in a delicate aside) to all the little Izlars.

They were rocking again, the warm air full of creaking wood and clicking rails and moaning whistles, when Wilson leaned briefly over his shoulder. It’ll be Fairfax, Mr. Woodruff, not Sharon. You’ll find the Fairfax House quite acceptable. Miss Maple.

Not stopping at Sharon?

Two minutes. Change of orders. Fairfax is just eighteen minutes on.

Peter nodded. It didn’t matter. One country dinner would be as overwhelming as another.—Painting the dining room? Revival in town and all the food gone? Crape on the door for Mrs. What’s-her-name?

Sharon looked to him as if the change of orders must have been the first change in forty years—the rifleman on the monument in the Square not quite so stone-white-new no doubt, the trees now tall enough to hide the courthouse clock but it was probably at 1:35 as then, the dog asleep in the shade under a country wagon looked like the same dog, and the same wagon. A few knots of people seemed unusually interested in talking among themselves instead of watching the train, but outside of that it was the Sharon of his mother and the children on the way to the seashore, heads and shoulders pitched back in unison now as then as the station began to pass.

He thought of using the quarter-hour to talk to George about Major DeLegal which he had been meaning to do one day, the old man with pains in the stomach that he hid from everyone but his son-in-law; he wouldn’t see a doctor, hadn’t been to one, Peter suspected, since they patched him up after Chickamauga. Peter thought if he could bring them together casually, perhaps out at Five Springs when they were all back from the beach, Major might feel different about doctors. But when George sat back from listening to the ladies (or one of them) he said as if for confirmation, I understand Leonard’s at the Island? and before Peter could say more than Oh! Wilson threw back the round-topped door and chanted, Fair-fax! Fairfax! the bell on the engine clanging a summer discord with the dinner bell the colored boy was tumbling on the hotel steps.

There was no hesitation as to who was to sit by whom, the bell ringer now headwaiter steering them to the first empty chairs at a half-filled table and George posting himself beside Margaret like a boy not to be separated from a birthday present, and Virginia, having sent Edna and the children and the lunch basket to a blistered summerhouse in the yard, settled like a sorority sister at the stranger’s other side. Peter felt alone and rather forgotten, but brides couldn’t hear anything you said anyway. Up and down the table and across it were people he didn’t know, most of them men, all of them hungry; they started the cavalcade of dishes before he could unfold his napkin, broiled chicken, fried chicken, pork chops, barbecue hash, rice, okra, snap beans, lima beans, squash, turnip greens, sweet potatoes—Virginia laughed in protest as he kept solemnly passing and Margaret finally threw up her hands. George said, Oh honey! You must keep up your strength, and Peter apologized for missing the Sharon Hotel, which didn’t try to cut corners on the bill of fare.

He was glad when the little man beside him said, Eudy’s the name. Odell Eudy. Eudy Hardware, up in Sharon. Just here for the day. Hotel owes me for a well bucket, some ax handles and a kerosene lantern so I said, ‘Eudy, go in there eat yourself a nice dinner on account.’

When Peter introduced himself Eudy blinked behind his dusty spectacles. What kin are you to the Congressman, Mr. Woodruff?

Ike? You know Ike?

Helped put him in office.

Ike’s my brother. Everybody knew Ike. It took twice as long to walk a block of Broad Street with Ike, stopping to talk, going on, stopping, and in between saluting everybody else. And by name. A name usually came to Peter fifty feet farther on, after he had firmly pronounced another one. Peter mentioned he had expected to have dinner at the Sharon Hotel and Eudy said, Little trouble up in Sharon I believe. Sheriff trying to run down a nigger broke in a man’s house after his payroll. Didn’t want the cars sitting there forty minutes, I reckon, passengers wandering round. First trouble in Sharon as long as I remember. Good business town, good church town.—Ike was in the store first of the week, Mr. Peter. We visited a while, opened a keg of nails.

Peter said he thought Ike was in Washington. No sir, said he was on his way to the Island to rest his ears from Congress in the sea breeze. I told him he stopped off thinking of all those elections worries he’s got next year—I love to joke Ike. There’s a telegraph pole down the track, Mr. Peter; Ike says when he passes that pole he quits worrying, the worries on the other side belong to Congressman Dobey. No sir, Ike’ll be in Congress for my grandchildren. I say so and there’s plenty round here just like me.

Peter could hardly keep a straight face at plenty just like me, such a solid pink-cheeked me, black suspenders, black belt, black tie, steel-rimmed glasses as tight as pants on a growing boy, collar freshly sponged. I believe you favor Ike, Mr. Peter.—Help yourself to the fried tomatoes (a Southernism for please pass).

Peter said Ike was younger than he was and looked it. He says he stays young not having a wife to worry him—she had worried him enough once—but I tell him it’s because the taxpayers feed him so well. He got Virginia’s attention and introduced them, and when they all stood up from the table he introduced the others, feeling like a campaign manager propping up a section of Ike’s fence (that needed no propping). He was glad Ike was at the Island—balancing off Leonard—probably not at the Hotel, at Miss Mayrant’s up the beach, Ike whom he didn’t see enough of, with their father in his deep-sunk eyes and their boyhood, whatever they might be talking about. Or silent about.

Four quick blasts from up the tracks cut everything short and they moved on to the coaches. Owen, spurning Margaret’s hand, took the steps at a bound that was meant to put her in her place but Martha accepted it and they went aboard, George watching them and probably thinking, as Peter was, that she liked children, would no doubt get on well with all the little Izlars.

In the smoking car George said, as if picking up a pencil from exactly where he had laid it, I was telling you about Leonard.

Peter admitted he hadn’t known Leonard was at the Island. He goes his own way, you know. We never see him—a half brother who was almost a stranger, and who seemed to prefer it like that, no quarrel, a sort of crystallized indifference which on Leonard’s part seemed to hold a shrug of disdain for business in general as represented by Peter, as well as for the professions as represented by Ike. Peter thought he lived with an aunt on his mother’s side, had some kind of clerk’s job in a harness shop. Down here for his vacation, I suppose?

George waited until the whistle died away. Let me tell you something about Leonard, then I’ll tell you why I’m telling you, as if drawing the words in through the open window out of the tumbling smudges of engine smoke. I was thinking of writing you but, well, I’d rather talk to you anyhow. A patient of his knew somebody on the faculty at the University who saw a lot of Leonard when Leonard was there. Dropped out after a year or so, money troubles maybe, maybe he just didn’t like it, not in his line. Leonard’s a painter, or wants to be. Painted at the University, been painting ever since. When he gets the chance; has his job to attend to. Or had.

‘Had?’

"I’ll tell you about that in a minute. The point is he hasn’t had the training or the experience yet but they think he’s got something that matters more. It sounds like what the Chinese call ch’i, the spirit of the thing, the breath of it. That engine steam out there, maybe ch’i is a sort of steam."

When George said his patient had tried to get Leonard a loan to put him through art school but it didn’t work out, Peter thought loan was the key to what was coming and he wondered what sort of answer he could find; personal loans, particularly to kin people, got into no end of complications, and the closer the kin the more edgy the complications.

Of course Leonard’s a little overage, Peter—must be twenty-three or four—but it’s hard to get a loan like that in any case. Law school, fine, or engineering, or medical school, but art school! Anyhow, no loan. Well, my patient has a house down here, shack or something, and he’s turned it over to Leonard for a month or two, told him to dig in there and paint up a lot of pictures and think it out with himself what his next step was. He sent Leonard for a vaccination before I went to Boston.

Peter’s Well, well hadn’t much enthusiasm in it, but did it matter if Leonard was at the Island? It was a big island.

"Leonard wasn’t quite what I expected. I suppose the only artists I ever saw were in La Bohème. This was an easy confident fellow, knowing what he wanted, I should say, but not how to get it. Some people would say it was a crackbrained sort of thing to quit your job and come down here by yourself to paint pictures but I don’t see it that way. And neither does Margaret. You don’t need a sidewalk cafe to make a painter of yourself—I guess that’s quoting him. Anyway, I was impressed. He laughed a little: It always impresses me, Peter, to see a man who knows what he wants to make of himself. Ike’s the same way. And maybe you too, but it doesn’t happen with everybody—"

Not me! I wasted three years trying to be a civil engineer, (the Other Road, on which you could always believe you had stopped just a quarter of a mile too soon). "You, I should say, George. You and Ike and Leonard."

"Me?—I thought I wanted to be a soldier, that Centurion who bids one man go and he goeth and another do this and he doeth it. Made my daddy send me to VMI (living in The Valley, wasn’t far). Then I thought I’d be a teacher. Taught school once in the Blue Ridge Mountains, smiling down the coach as if it had been a swaying gallery of years, Peter glad for the change of tone that suggested he had left Leonard behind. Lived with a family in a gap of the hills. Once or twice a week a wagon would come by with bark for the tannery and everybody would flock to the door and the old man would say, ‘Must be mighty lonesome for them folks back in the hills don’t live on a big road.’ Climbed up along the creek every morning to the school, crossed on a cypress log. Nice in summer. In winter not so nice, sleet, snow. Ice on the log. Dozen in the school, depending on the crops. Taught them Shakespeare—as though lifting it all down in little parcels from the baggage racks. Look to her, Moor, as thou hast eyes to see, she has deceived her father and may thee. The language didn’t bother them. One of them said (I remember his name, Floyd Amburgey), ‘Seems to me, Professor, that man ought to found out for sure before he choked that lady.’ Evenings were long though. Dug out the Odyssey with a dictionary. Read anything I could find. ‘Come, my friends, ‘tis not too late to seek a newer world.’ I think that was when I decided to pull out and study medicine. I was the oldest intern in Massachusetts. You save a lot of time to meet yourself early.—I didn’t finish telling you about Leonard."

Peter grunted as if merely surprised.

I want to go over and check on him while I’m down here. If he’s just loafing around I’m through with it. But if he’s doing some real work—and you don’t tell me I’m a damn fool—

Me, George?

I want you to come with me. If he really means business, well, Peter, I’m probably going to stake him.

He wasn’t quite prepared for that and before he found a comment George went on, as if he thought an explanation was due: old Malcolm Trafford had sent him a check the other day. Sent Margaret a wedding present but this was marked ‘For Professional Services. Bill incorrect.’ Got me up one rainy night last winter to go see his chauffeur with a stomach-ache. I sent him a bill, ten or fifteen dollars. His check was for two hundred and fifty. No use to argue with him. I’m thinking of staking Leonard with it, no interest, pay me when he can. Not much of a stake but—

Peter was glad for the engine’s long, bending whistle; it gave him a few seconds. He was the one to be putting up money for Leonard (if anybody was); George wasn’t saying that, but Peter thought he was saying there was room to add to the stake if anybody wanted to. He might have resented the hint in a more business-minded person but in George it only made him smile. I know what you’re getting at, George.

I’m not getting at anything—not exactly, laughing with his shoulders. I just want you and me to go over and see him, see how we feel about him. See if you think I’d be throwing my money in the river. He may be lying up in bed drunk.

2

Leonard might as well have been drunk as far as Peter was concerned; nobody at the shack, but the door open and revealing a housekeeper’s nightmare: paint-streaked white paper scattered round the floor (eight large sheets and as many that might have been ripped from a notebook), puddles on the bare boards, a saucepan of bluish water by the leg of a chair, a white chipped dinner plate on an unmade cot—balls of soft color on the rim of the plate—a sinkful of unwashed dishes, a Nehi bottle on the drainboard by a rusty handpump. He gave George a look that said, Does this answer your question? but George said only, Seems to have gone out, calling his name again then getting ready to sit on a step of the porch. Might give him a few minutes.

He had sat at one of Mrs. Veigle’s uncertain wicker desks and written Virginia a note in his flowing loops and curls that reminded you of the French horns in the band at the Fort—… going up to try to find Leonard … taking Owen, wants to see a live artist … Back by 12. Maybe you and Margaret could walk up to Mayrant’s and bring Ike back for dinner? Love, P.—hardly able to think for the parrot squawking at George and Owen beyond the writing-room door, Good morning, have you seen the Duke of Killicrankie? (not the Duke in person but the play that had made Mrs. Veigle’s Tillie O’Shea the Toast of New York—to hear her mother). When’s she coming home I can see her, Mrs. Veigle? Home! Boy, you’ll have to go to Broadway to see Tillie. He propped the envelope against Virginia’s napkin ring, almost sat down for a second breakfast, feeling half fed with no morning paper until the mail came.

They took the trolley to the end of the line, hats in their laps, hair blowing (not Owen’s, Lord help him!), lapels flapping; you could feel the wind circling up your pants and round your garters, a gust now and then lifting the cloth off your knees, the wonderful briny air going down into your up-country lungs, as enlivening as an alcohol rub.

At the Pavilion they got down, skirted Joyland and the three or four amusements still blear-eyed from the night before and followed directions into the liveoaks, the trees blotting up the wind and the cooling damp. Leonard’s shack—the proper name for it—faced a green hot view of creeks and marshes, a two-plank dock staggering out over the sword grass. Peter was ready to leave before they looked in the door; now, on the steps fanning insects with his hat he mumbled, Virginia’s sister Nancy did water colors, until she caught a husband. George confessed he hadn’t known Leonard was a water-color painter, and Peter said, Father used to say, George, ‘Any decision involving more than five dollars you better sleep on it.’ He pointed at a rowboat drifting along the marsh: Leonard’s gone fishing. He won’t be back until the tide turns. He heard Owen inside and was about to reprove him for snooping when George said, Let’s snoop a little bit.

They didn’t have to snoop far. Beyond the sink and a kerosene two-burner was a space with pictures enough—boats, docks, trees, crabs, nets, people from the Park, performers, ticket-takers, skaters, bright horses from the merry-go-round, most of the pictures on pasteboard and wooden boxtops, a few on canvas; one of a high-diver was on a strip of awning tacked to the door. George said, Hhm, hhm, and then, "Well, he hasn’t spent every day fishing, and then, Suppose I leave him a message, tell him to come over and see us."

Haven’t you seen enough of him already?

I’ll tell him to come over about five, tearing a page out of his black notebook, and we’ll go up to Guard Mount and hear the band. He smiled at Peter; I won’t ask him to supper until we know a little more.

But from the trolley stop they saw a hunched-over shape on a campstool under the Pavilion and George said, There he is.

The sand and the low-tide surf-sounds muffled their steps, Leonard engrossed anyway, a canvas flat on the damp beach at his feet (bare), a paintbox to one side with the contents in as much of a mess as the shack, pants that had been white rolled up to his knees. His sleeves were rolled up to the shoulder and George leaned over from behind and said, That’s a good scar, if I do say so.

Leonard seemed to come up from a deep dive, flipping his head as if to get water off his face; Peter thought he might have shaved about a week ago and his hair reminded him of Virginia’s saying there was no barber on the Island. He scowled at them for an instant then broke into a smile: Doctor! He dropped the brushes in the box as if through with them and stood up, wiping his hand on the pants and holding it out to George then to Pete—it was slightly sticky and left a trace of blue—then, as Owen appeared, holding it out to Owen, man-to-man, no years between.

When George finished explaining they had stopped by his house, snooped a bit, just happened to see him here, Peter said, You’ve picked yourself a nice cool place, Leonard.

Leonard said good-naturedly, ignoring the criticism in it, that that was the first thing you did when you went out to paint; You don’t pick a subject, you pick a place to set up. And George said, That’s right, Leonard, a man can’t think in a worrisome place. Thackeray says you can’t enjoy being an archbishop with a tack in your shoe. You pick a nice place, Doctor, and then you look all round, demonstrating, and you see something over there you sort of like, but the harder you look the less you like it and you turn all the way round and look at what’s behind you, and that’s what you paint, the brand-new look.

Peter rolled up his eyes. He thought Leonard was a little like his Great-uncle Jake (on the Gaines side), a charming man who hadn’t so much come to a bad end as to practically no end at all, collapsing one day between the Cotton Exchange and the Commercial Club where he was valued as an expert on whist, backgammon and rye; some people just didn’t like work. He glanced at the brand-new look on the canvas that Owen was studying, an array of dark green pilings and slanted braces with some beach and sky beyond; it made him wonder what in God’s name was the other look but before he could search it out he heard George saying, Come over to supper, Leonard. We’ll be taking the ladies up to the Fort about five—

Acceptance came in the middle of the invitation; no painting of pictures stood in the way, no sweeping of quarters, washing of dishes-cutting of hair, indeed. I’d like—

Peter didn’t hear the rest for Owen’s pulling at his coat pocket and signaling a need to whisper that set Peter glancing about for a hollow in the dunes. No sir, I don’t mean that, I mean I want to watch him paint.

Well, watch him.

He ain’t going to paint with everybody standing here. I could stay and watch him, come on home by myself, know the way, ain’t scared, eagerness burning like a lightwood splinter and sending Peter back into the years when wants stung you like a bee. He hesitated and Owen followed it up: I can come back with him when he comes. If he says it’s all right you can stay a while, but you come back for dinner. Yes sir. Two o’clock. Yes sir. All right, I’ll ask him.

On the trolley, the wind whisking their trouser legs again, he said (his prerogative as kin to throw the first stone), Some people, you know, George, are just congenitally opposed to work. You remember old Jake Gaines—

Peter, I kind of like the fellow, speaking with a half-apologetic chuckle. I don’t think he minds work. He may not be much of a painter but he’s painted a lot of pictures, he’s a tryer. I mean work, George. Maybe I like him because I gave him a vaccination. I always get to liking my patients, professionally inadvisable, but I do. And the more help I can be to them the better I like them.

You’re ready to stake him?

I want to think a little more, see what Margaret thinks of him.

Peter shook his head. If you help a man because you like him, George, and then like him because you help him—you’re as good as broke now. Good gracious, Owen’s broke too! Forgot to give him carfare.

George laughed. Leonard’ll stake him.

3

Owen asked him why he went and made the sky so green and Leonard said, You just sit right still now and keep your mouth shut, not mean, just straight-out, no coddling, no darling-this, darling-that, darling-be-careful, the tide turning now, the waves with a fresher bounce as if they had had a good nap, edges chasing round the shaggy piles like crabs.

After a while: You think it’s too green. Yes sir. Hhm. Starts out too yellow then gets too green.

Mix up what it ought to be, with a wave at the tubes and the knife, going right on, over his knees, spreading the buttery paint, paying no attention to the growing silence and the growing temptation. And not much to the halfhearted protest, I don’t know how you get in them things.

You get in a tube of toothpaste, don’t you?

Yes sir, but this stuff’s way yonder something else.

Take a little blue, pointing with the brush handle. Put some white in it. There’s the knife. Mix it up. What’s the matter, you think it bites? leathery hands hanging between his knees, Owen picking up the knife, limber and live and shining as an uncaught fish, pushing the blue and white together, mashing a smell out of it as well as a new blue. Then, You like that?

"No sir, that’s too blue."

Throw in a little yellow, there it is, zinc yellow, watching while the mess went into green like a shying horse, then, Pick up a little red, the littlest bit you can pick up. Too much. Here, taking the knife which seemed to become less of a knife and more of a sixth finger, flashing, scraping, turning, the fish caught. And a blue coming out of the red and yellow again but not as blue as before.

That’s it, yes sir. That’s what sky looks like. Hold it up on the knife.

"Too shiny on