The Committee. Sterling Watson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ It was an odd thing, irony, because Stall believed that he loved his fellow man, loved Him with a capital H in the way that Whitman had loved the crowds in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

       We fathom you not—we love you—there is per-

       fection in you also,

       You furnish your parts toward eternity,

       Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the

       Soul.

      Stall loved people in the aggregate for their wonderful, messy, preposterous, goofy optimism. Loving his fellow man in his individual, farting, nose-picking, often criminally stupid state was hard, but Stall tried. In the war he’d seen the worst of human doings (blessedly, for a very short time), but he’d come away from that experience with a stronger sense of human goodness. He’d seen incredible valor too. Should he ever realize his dream of returning to Paris with enough money to show Maureen around in style, he knew that Jean-Paul Sartre and his sometime friend Albert Camus would not allow him even to walk past their café, Les Deux Magots, much less have a drink with them. Loving the world was not their cup of absinthe.

      After thinking it over through a sip of martini, Maureen said, “No, don’t call her now. I think it’s better for you to wait until we know more.” She looked out through the kitchen window at their backyard where a pair of cardinals, bright red cock and dull hen, splashed in the birdbath. To the window she said, “I’m sure someone has told her about Jack. Someone from the hospital or the police. We’ll call together tomorrow.”

      By the tone of her voice and the way she surveyed the backyard, beautiful in the falling summer light, Stall knew that she was composing the image in her mind of exactly how to comfort Sarah Leaf. The right way to do it.

      * * *

      After dinner and after Stall and his wife had told their daughter that something bad had happened at the university and this bad thing, the death of a friend, had made her mother cry, their daughter Corey, a hearty, athletic girl of twelve who had not known Jack Leaf except as a man to say hello to as he came and went at the few departmental gatherings the Stalls had hosted, seemed to take the death of Jack Leaf more as an idea (people die), than as anything personal.

      Stall had taken pains to tell her that there was a very good chance that Jack Leaf had accidentally fallen from a window. Corey had asked a few questions, and these matched the logic of accidents, not suicide: Was Mr. Leaf teaching when he fell? Did the students see him fall? Did anyone try to catch him? When Stall could see that she was more or less satisfied with her parents’ explanations, he sent her to her room to finish her homework. Her mother said, “Corey, you’ll hear about this in school tomorrow. It’s better not to say that Daddy had anything to do with it.”

      “But Mom, isn’t that lying?”

      “No, lying is saying something that’s untrue. Saying nothing is not lying. It’s discretion.”

      Both Stalls knew that their daughter would beat a path to her dictionary, so Stall said to her retreating, pajamaed form, “That’s d-i-s, not d-e-s.”

      After washing and drying the dishes, Stall and his wife sat at the kitchen table, the place of their most serious discussions, with third martinis in front of them and commenced what Stall hoped would be a kind of elegy for Jack Leaf. The best thing they could do tonight, a thing in keeping with what Stall thought of as his love of the world, was to remember Jack Leaf well. Tell stories. Bring him back to life in words.

      “Why did he do it?” Maureen sipped and gave Stall a look he saw only rarely. She was what the frat boys called a cheap date; the reference was to capacity for liquor not morals, though the two sometimes became confused. From experience, Stall knew that she was very close to the line that separated earnestly inebriated from stupidly drunk. He had only seen her on the far side of the line a few times, and over there she was not pretty. In that country she was abrupt, far too truthful, sometimes angry, and often inclined to think she had discovered things about her husband that her sober mind would have left alone. Stall had poured the third martini hoping it would be elegiac, lubrication for a Whitmanesque celebration of Jack Leaf. He had led Maureen here to the borderland, or at least he had not stopped her from approaching it. He said, “We’d better take it easy,” and reached out to place a hand across her glass.

      She slid the glass out of reach. “I asked you why he did it.”

      Stall shrugged. In the last hour, fatigue had hit him. It was nine o’clock and felt like midnight. He’d had five drinks and was reconnoitering number six. “I don’t know,” he said. It was the truth, but not all of it.

      Maureen gave him the sharp look again, and when her head turned toward him, her glass lurched, spilling some of the crystalline fluid. “Was it the war?”

      Jack Leaf, like many men who had fought, had not talked much about the war. He answered questions when asked, but questions were rare and his answers were brief. The English faculty were his social group, and they were, like Stall, mostly born to the role of spectator. Jack Leaf could have said a lot about the war, most people knew that, but he chose not to talk, and people respected his silence.

      Stall had gone to the war, had served honorably if briefly, had been wounded, had nearly died of an infection probably resulting from having contaminated the shrapnel wound at the back of his thigh with shit that had exploded from his bowels with the concussion that came milliseconds after the explosion of a German shell. He had returned to consciousness lying in the snow between two dead men. He could not call them buddies, friends, anything like that. In the darkness, confusion, fear, and frenzy they had been shapes, faces safer for him than those of the men shooting at him, but nothing more than that.

      When Stall awoke, the battle had moved on. In the distance, rifles rattled and cannons flashed. It was unbearably cold and he had no idea where he was. He assumed that he had been left for dead, covered as he was with blood from the men on either side of him. He waited until morning, shivering in the pathetically light wool greatcoat the army had considered adequate for Europe in the winter of 1945. The bleeding at the back of his thigh had stopped, and when dawn came he found that he could walk well enough leaning on the rifle he had found, and that walking did not cause the bleeding to start again. He never found his platoon (most of the forty had been killed), and never found his company, but he found the army and attached himself to it. He did not report the wound which he considered insignificant. For another week he walked, crouched, starved, shivered, and tried to hack holes in frozen ground until his thigh swelled to the size of his waist and he was sent to the rear with a raging fever, incipient gangrene, and the probability of amputation.

      His leg was saved by the first-ever application in wartime of a new drug known as penicillin. His recovery took months, and when he was strong enough to enjoy a weekend pass, he went to Paris. Like Jack Leaf, Tom Stall never talked much about his war. He was proud to have served in what he considered a great cause, but he had seen too much of the chaos that arose from the best intentions to care much for causes again. One cause in a lifetime was enough. Now life, to Stall, was an everyday thing. Goodness was in a wife’s kiss and the feel of her breast as you left a warm bed in the morning, a child’s smile at the breakfast table. It was in a good cup of coffee at a drugstore counter, it was in talking to friends, and in more complicated ways it was in good books, and that was all there was to it.

      If Stall had a regret, it was that his wound was not in the front of his body. He had been lying facedown in the snow when the shell exploded, a German 88 with a proximity fuse. A shell designed to burst above the heads of troops, to kill men crouching in holes in СКАЧАТЬ