“I’ll always regret not getting to know Tom years back,” Paul said, “when you first suggested it. I was foolish about that.”
“No, I could understand how you felt,” Michael assured him. “Anybody who makes it big in a commercial way at twenty-six or – seven is bound to be a little intimidating to strangers. If I hadn’t met him by accident I probably never would’ve – you know – never would’ve sought him out, or anything. Might have been better off all around, too.”
“Well, but the word ‘commercial’ isn’t really appropriate for Tom,” Paul objected. “It may apply to a flukey kind of luck like Morin’s, but that’s an entirely different thing. Tom’s a professional. He found his line early and he’s stayed with it. You have to admire that.”
“Well, I guess you have to respect it; I’m not sure it’s something you necessarily have to admire.” And Michael didn’t like the way this talk was going. Not very many years ago he had tried to defend Tom Nelson against Paul Maitland, only to find his lines of defense falling apart under Paul’s attack; now the roles were exactly reversed, and he had an uneasy sense that he was about to collapse again. It didn’t seem fair – there ought to be more consistency in the world than this – and the worst part was that nothing could be said to be at stake anymore for either adversary: they had both been reduced to eking out a living in farm-state colleges, probably for life, while Tom Nelson went serenely about the business of success.
“His standards are as high as those of any painter I know,” Paul was saying, warming to the argument, “and he’s never sold a picture he doesn’t believe in. I don’t see how anyone can ask more of an artist than that.”
“Well, okay, you may be right about the professional part of it,” Michael conceded, with the deliberation of a strategist abandoning one position in order to strengthen another. “But the man himself is something else. Nelson can be a prick when he puts his mind to it. Or if not a prick, at least a real pain in the ass.”
And almost before he knew what his talking mouth was up to, he had launched into the story of the trip to Montreal. It took longer to tell than he’d thought it would – that was bad enough – and there seemed to be no way of telling it that didn’t portray himself as something of a fool.
Sarah’s calm, brown-eyed gaze was leveled at him above her neatly held coffee cup while he talked. She had wept in silence after his drunken bungling at Terry Ryan’s expense; she had been openly disappointed in him time and again since then (“Well, now you’ve lost me completely”); by now there had come to be a certain resignation in her way of waiting for him to discredit himself.
“… No, but the point is Nelson knew I could’ve had that girl that night,” he heard himself saying, trying to explain and redeem the story after it had been told. “He was half sick with envy – you could see it all over his face – but he knew too that all he had to do was hang around and be a nuisance, which wouldn’t cost him anything because none of his other friends were there to see it happening, and then he could make sure I’d be out of luck. So that’s the way the little son of a bitch decided to play it, and you could see the decision in his face too: Sly. Smart-assed. Pleased with himself. Oh, and as for his remark on the way home, about the girl thinking we were fags, the funny part there is that Nelson’s spent his whole life afraid of being mistaken for a fag. He’s obsessed with it. I remember days on end when he couldn’t talk about anything else, and I always figured it might help explain his wanting to dress up like a soldier all the time.”
But neither the story nor its explanation had gone over very well with this particular audience: all three of their faces looked unconvinced and unsatisfied.
“I don’t get it, though, Michael,” Sarah said. “If you really wanted the girl, why didn’t you stay in Montreal a few more days?”
“Good question,” he told her. “I’ve been asking myself the same question ever since. I guess the only answer is that I was so snowed by Tom Nelson then I’d go along with whatever the hell he felt like doing.”
“That’s a curious expression, ‘snowed,’ ” Paul said thoughtfully. “I certainly came to admire Tom, once I knew him, but I don’t think I’ve ever been ‘snowed’ by him.”
“Yeah, well, there’s the difference between you and me,” Michael said. “That’s probably why you get letters from him, and all I get is fucking cartoons.”
Mercifully, then, they managed to change the subject; their talk turned to summer vacations.
The Maitlands hadn’t been able to afford an extended trip this year, Paul said, but next summer they planned to spend the whole of their time on Cape Cod.
“That sounds lovely,” Sarah said.
“Well, but I think I like the Cape even better in the off-season,” Peggy pointed out. “We used to know some wonderful people there during the winters. Carnival people. They were gypsies.”
And Michael knew she would now tell the same little anecdote about the sword-swallower that she’d told in Putnam County at least ten years ago, when it had driven the young, stagestruck Ralph Morin into peals of artificial laughter as he pronounced it the very heart and spirit of the entertainer. Sure enough, when she came to the punch line she delivered it word for word:
“… So I said ‘Doesn’t that hurt?’ And he said ‘Think I’d tell you?’ ”
Sarah rewarded her with an agreeable laugh and Michael was able to chuckle too; Paul Maitland only fondled his mustache as if to mask his having heard the thing far too many times in the past.
Half an hour later, out in the driveway, the Maitlands stood smiling and waving goodbye as attractively as if they were posing for a snapshot – a comfortable Illinois art teacher and his wife, good people who couldn’t afford very many extended trips but at least would never be “snowed” by anyone, sensible people a long way from Delancey Street and willing to settle, with African art and home-baked bread, for a great deal less than the stuff of their dreams.
“Well, Paul’s very nice, of course,” Sarah said when they’d settled down for the long drive back to Kansas, “but I didn’t sense anything out of the ordinary about him. I can’t imagine how you could’ve romanticized him all these years.”
“Whaddya mean? I don’t think I’ve ever done that.”
“Oh, sure you have. Come on, Michael. Just before you knocked him out that night you were telling him you’d always thought he was ‘enchanted.’ ”
“Jesus,” he said. “I thought you were in the kitchen all that time.”
“Well, I’d been in the kitchen, but I’d come out. Then after you hit him I went back in, because I knew you’d be coming around to look for me there.”
“I’ll be damned. And how come you never mentioned it until now?”
“Oh, because I knew you’d explain it to me, I suppose,” she said, “and because I didn’t want to hear the explanation.”
A son, James Garvey Davenport, was born to them in June of 1972. He was healthy and well-formed, and Sarah made what one doctor called a reasonably quick recovery, but the birth itself was extremely difficult.
According to the way Michael heard it, the baby began to emerge from her upside down, and some fool of an obstetrician kept trying to turn it over with forceps. Then a number of other men were summoned to the delivery room to frown and mutter over the case; in the end they had to wheel Sarah unconscious into an elevator and down to another floor, where an emergency cesarean section was finally performed – almost, it seemed, in the nick of time.
“Kansas!” Michael said at her bedside, while she lay weakly sipping from a paper cup of ginger ale through a paper straw. “This kind of blundering incompetence couldn’t happen anywhere else but fucking Kansas.”
“Oh, that’s silly,” she told him. “Anyway, I think he’s awfully nice.”
And he thought she meant one of the doctors, some fatherly Kansas asshole who might have murmured a few pleasant words to her as she came out of the anesthetic. “Who?” he demanded. “Who’s awfully nice?
”
“The baby,” she said. “Don’t you think he’s an awfully nice-looking boy?”
All he had seen, through the plate glass, was a wrinkled, wobbling head that didn’t look much bigger than a walnut, with its mouth stretched open in a cry that couldn’t be distinguished from the cries of all the other newly born on every side.
“Well, he did look a little blue at first,” an elderly nurse confided to him outside the nursery window, wearing her sterile mask beneath her chin to show she was off duty. “He was blue when we got him, but then we put him in the incubator and he pinked right up.”
That night, trying to chew and swallow an overcooked hamburger in a restaurant that wasn’t even licensed to serve beer, he allowed his mind to speculate on children of the kind who had been born “blue babies.” Did their eyes look funny? Did they learn only to smile and drool and stammer incoherently, rather than to speak? Did they walk with a softly lurching gait in well-supervised groups, carefully instructed to hold hands with one another when they came to street crossings? Was basket weaving about the most you could expect of them in the way of educational attainment?
Well, but then surely the lady wouldn’t have been so cheerful in reporting that this particular blue baby had “pinked right up” – she probably wouldn’t have told him about the blue part of it at all if she hadn’t meant the pinking-up to be reassuring news.
Even so, as he paid his check and got out of that lousy restaurant and made his way home, he was willing to acknowledge that he wished it had been a girl. Oh, having a son was said to be a splendid thing – there were even men who openly expressed disappointment at the birth of daughters, and who saved all their primal exultation for sons – but Michael didn’t feel up to any of that Old Testament bullshit tonight.
Girls were – well, nicer than boys; everybody knew that. All you had to do with a girl was throw her in the air and hug her and kiss her and tell her how pretty she was. Even after she grew too big to ride on your shoulders you could take her to the zoo and buy her a box of Crackerjack and a balloon (you always had to tie the string of it around her wrist so it couldn’t float away), or you could take her to a matinee of The Music Man and see her sad little face transformed into pure rapture at all the unexpected wonders on the stage. Then came the achingly tender years: once when Laura was thirteen, and possibly at her mother’s suggestion, she had called him up from Tonapac to say “Daddy? Guess what! I’m menstruating!”
And sure, of course there could be trouble later: A girl might develop a piercing, near-deadly talent for shock-your-father tactics; she might languish around the house for months, having to be bullied into making her bed, never quite able – for God only knew what reasons – to get past page 98 of whatever the hell she was pretending to read. Still, even in the worst of times like that, there would always be signs that she was going to be all right. A girl could come out of almost any kind of slump because girls were amazingly resilient. They were graceful; they were swift and smart.
But oh, Jesus, a boy could be a real pain in the ass. If you feigned sparring with a boy in his little drop-seat pajamas at bedtime he might expect to be known as “Slugger,” and might pucker up and cry if you ever forgot to call him by that name. At nine or ten he would pester you to take him out in the backyard and teach him how to throw, whether you were altogether sure you knew how to throw or not; then there would be vigorous outdoor father-and-son activities, organized by the fire department or the VFW, where you might find you didn’t know what to say to any of the other fathers or their shitty little sons.
At sixteen or so, if he was turning into a humorless, intellectual kind of kid, he might want you to sit down with him for serious talks about honor and integrity and moral courage until your head swam with those abstractions; or, worse, he might become a surly, slouching, spitting youth who would rarely speak at all except in monosyllables, and who would care about nothing in the world but cars.
Either way, by the time he was of college age he would almost certainly come to stand in the doorway of a room where you were trying to get some work done, and he’d say “Dad? Do you know how much alcohol you’ve taken into your bloodstream today? Do you know how many packs of cigarettes you’ve smoked? Well, listen: I think you’re trying to kill yourself. And I want to tell you something: if you’re going to kill yourself I wish you’d hurry up and get it over with. Because frankly, you see, it’s not you I’m concerned about. It’s Mom.”
Oh, shit; and there were still other possibilities too dreadful to contemplate. What if, in response to things that struck him as funny, your son took to saying “I love it” or “Oh, how delicious”? What if he wanted to walk around the kitchen with one hand on his hip, telling his mother about the marvelous time he’d had with his friends last night at a really nice new place in town called the Art Deco?
It was nearly three o’clock in the morning when Michael Davenport went to bed at last, too drunk even to realize it would be the first time he had slept alone in this house. All he knew for certain, as he pulled the bedclothes sloppily around and over him, was that none of it was fair: he shouldn’t be expected to endure any of this because he was too fucking old. He was forty-nine.
For many months the house seemed almost to tremble with fragility and tenderness and long silences. Though still frail and tired at first, Sarah was an ideal young mother. She took a girlish pride in breastfeeding; she carried her son very slowly up and down the hall to the tune of a charming little music box that one of the faculty families had sent as a gift; she would always place a forefinger at her lips and say “Sh-sh” to her husband after laying the baby down in the crib and softly closing the door behind her.
And Michael found he could go along with the reverence – he liked it, if only because it showed Sarah in a fine and admirable new light that any man would be a fool not to cherish – but his only previous knowledge of this kind of thing was well over twenty years in the past. He could have sworn that the infant Laura had never smelled this bad or soiled this many diapers, that she hadn’t cried this long and loud, or puked this often, or inflicted such a general, around-the-clock strain on his nerves.
All right, you little bastard, he would say just under his breath during the times when it was his turn to walk the baby in the sweet tinkling melody of the music box, while Sarah slept. All right, you stubborn little son of a bitch, but you’d better be worth it. You’d damn sure better turn out to be worth all this shit, or I’ll never forgive you. Is that clear?
Surprisingly, and perhaps because he had to steal the time for it, Michael wrote well during his son’s first year. New poems began to come easily, and so did ideas for how best to salvage and restore a number of old, failed ones. By the time Jimmy Davenport was able to stand and take hesitant sidling steps, using the edges of the coffee table for support, there was enough finished manuscript on his father’s desk to comprise a new book.
And Michael was prepared to admit there might not be much brilliance in this fourth collection, but he felt there was nothing in it to be ashamed of, either: the things he’d learned about professionalism over the years could be sensed on every page.
“Well, I think it’s – quite good, Michael,” Sarah said one evening when she’d had time to read the whole manuscript at last. “All the poems are interesting, and they’ve been nicely worked out. They’re very – sound. I couldn’t find any weak places.”
She was seated under a good lamp on the living-room sofa, looking as young and pretty as he’d ever seen her look before, frowning slightly now and fingering back through the pages as if in search of weak places that might have escaped her notice on the first reading.
“You have any particular favorites?”
“I don’t think so, no; I think I liked them all about equally well.”
And he had to acknowledge, as he went to the kitchen to refill their whiskey glasses, that he’d hoped for higher praise. This was the book he’d been writing as long as he’d known her; i
t would have her name on its dedication page. It might have seemed only fair of her to come through with some show of excitement, even if she’d had to fake it; still, he knew it would be a mistake to let her know he was disappointed.
“Well, look, dear,” he said, bringing two fresh drinks back into the room. “I’ve come to think of this as kind of a transitional book – kind of a plateau performance, if you see what I mean. I think I still know how to do the big stuff, how to take the big risks and bring them off, but those things will have to wait now until the next book. The fifth book. And I’m already working on one idea for that one that feels about as ambitious and encouraging as anything I’ve done since – you know, since ‘Coming Clean.’ All I’m going to need is time.”
“Well, that sounds – that sounds good,” Sarah said.
“Meanwhile I think this collection is worth publishing, and I’m very, very pleased if you think so, too.”
“Yes,” she said. “Well, I do.”
“Tell you one thing I’ve decided, though,” he told her, slowly pacing the carpet. “I’ve decided not to send it off right away. I think I’d rather hold it back for a while, because the new work I’ll be doing might help me find ways to make it better. I mean, it seems like a finished book now, but a few of the poems might still break open and need to be fixed.”
And he hoped she would object to that plan – he wanted her to say No, Michael, it is a finished book; I’d send it off just as it stands, if I were you – but she didn’t.
“Well,” she said, “I suppose you have to trust your own judgment about something like that.” Then, setting the manuscript aside on the sofa, she said she didn’t really want the drink he’d brought because she was terribly sleepy.
When the warm weather came around again they took to having picnic lunches in their backyard, on a blanket spread over the grass. That was nice. Michael liked to recline on one elbow with a cold beer in his other hand while his lovely wife arranged the sandwiches and the deviled eggs on paper plates; he liked to watch his son toddle through sunlight and shade as earnestly as if he were discovering the world.