The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus Read online

  THE UNCOLLECTED

  STORIES OF

  ALLAN GURGANUS

  LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  A DIVISION OF W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  TO JANE HOLDING

  whose company makes even the unendurable

  worthwhile,

  and who heard these tales first.

  There is another world, but it is in this one.

  —PATRICK WHITE

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor

  The Mortician Confesses

  He’s at the Office

  Unassisted Human Flight

  A Fool for Christmas

  Fetch

  The Deluxe $19.95 Walking Tour of Historic Falls (NC) —Light Lunch Inclusive

  Fourteen Feet of Water in My House

  My Heart Is a Snake Farm

  THE

  UNCOLLECTED

  STORIES

  OF

  ALLAN GURGANUS

  THE WISH FOR A GOOD YOUNG COUNTRY DOCTOR

  MOST KIDS lose or break their toys. I curated mine.

  Sure, I’ve lived long enough to earn this Santa beard. But some of what pleased me as a boy still does. Who can resist smooth objects, ideally miniaturized, made only to be funny, colorful, and touched?

  The master’s thesis became my first book: Hand-Wrought Iowa-Illinois Farm Toys 1880–1920. In 1976 the University of Iowa renamed an existing history-literature program “America Studies.” It drafted me and other merry hippie researchers. The school issued us small monthly checks to go gather “folk manifestations.” We plundered far-flung Salvation Army thrifts and rural junk shops. We hunted the simple tools and dolls our essays over-interpreted. Such start-up treasures helped form my folk collection, one not-unknown today.

  Hand-wrought nineteenth century artifacts were criminally cheap then. “Midwesterners don’t know what they have … had,” we Easterners gloated after country raids.

  Prior to radio, before television, savage winters spent indoors made many German-Americans excellent woodcarvers. Unable to afford child-whimsies (even from the Sears catalogue), a farmer just whittled his brood’s amusements. Those things sure lasted! Here we have a horse-drawn farm cart toy-scaled for one specific kid. You can still feel the dad’s February yearning for warm weather, for October’s wheat crop. You can sense this carver’s love for the mismatched horses hand-portrayed and for his boy, born to inherit Dobbin, Paint, and the family acreage.

  These days, I’m sometimes interviewed about my collection. Lazier reporters ask me to name my single most valuable purchase. It was actually a gift. I divide my career into two rough phases: “Toy” and “Post-Childish Things.” And this—hung right over my rolltop desk—still marks the turning point.

  Until moving there on scholarship, I had not known the Middle West. New Englanders are sometimes called emotionally frozen. Southerners? considered armed traditionalist hotheads. I soon learned Midwesterners have flukes, too. They’re simply better at hiding. Everything. They practice Nordic shunning. They know you can kill your neighbor’s soul simply by ignoring it.

  Even now there is a town in Illinois that chose to name itself Preemption.

  We cheerful Ivy youngsters, lured to Iowa City, were given five twenties a month to go spend on outsider art. Our professor joked this was: “ethnographic colonialism within one’s native land.” He’d been born in Rome, and his standing room lectures inspired; he was callous in the pan-gender bedding of his students—yet sensitive to how all empires fall. He’d grown up amid artistic beauty broken to bits but left in place.

  We set off that Friday full of caffeine and an acquisitive sleekness that sometimes passed for sexy. Wearing thrift-shop moose-motif sweaters, driving borrowed jalopies, we were cerebral hucksters out to plunder the second-flight antique shops of eastern Iowa, western Illinois. The odder our finds, the brainier we felt. Uncover some hand-wrought gimcrack, write an article about it, read that aloud in class then seek publication in some journal suitably obscure. Our Roman professor stressed the long view, advising us: “Sapete sempre che voi siete stranieri … in un paese molto più strano.” And, this being a state school, he immediately translated: “‘Always know you are strangers … in a land far stranger.’”

  That day I’d already spent eighty of my allotted hundred. The haul so far? —One rural mailbox, made in a 1946 shop-class and shaped like—not one or two but three Scotty terriers, two white, the middle one black, whose conjoined mouths accepted letters, parcels. —One pink chintz hostess smock edged with so much 1940s ric-a-rac it looked all but Aztec.

  And, best, my hands-down ironic iconic Find of the Week, one handsomely lettered five-foot sign explaining, “You’ve Got To Be A Football Hero To Get Along with the Beautiful Girls. —THEREFORE, GO TECH!”

  This kind of joke was then thought ‘smart.’ And no one lived more enslaved to fashionable smartness than a hyper-educated boy of twenty-six with his twenty-nine-inch waist and, so Mother always hinted, a colossal IQ. I look back on him with a curatorial mixture of pride, amusement and pity. I think he condescended to the very loot he intended to praise and save. (But surely that problem’s built into taking a graduate degree in “self-taught artists”!) And yet, the kid was a student, thereby admitting he had a little something left to learn.

  We’d clocked our many country-miles that long Friday’s ‘picking.’ Classmates were now bound back to Iowa City in a borrowed Ford wagon; I followed in my overloaded Jeep. We stopped for gas and bathrooms. Then the others waved goodbye. Though tired and hungry, I still felt greedy for one more twenty-dollar prize. Proud as I was of my football pep-squad board, I knew I’d not yet found this outing’s “it.” I imagined discovering, in every dairy barn I passed, some primitive oil portrait done of Lincoln when yet a beardless state legislator here.

  Looking back on my start-up self, I at least feel stirred by all the lit-up detective attention. Peculiar to the Young, this expectation of discovery. I miss such crazed daily belief! Maybe I knew even then that the word belief springs from the German for beloved.

  My friends swore they’d save me a stool at Hamburg Inn No. 1. The Blue Plate Special, this being Friday, was surely fried fish. Sunset offered a limitless salmon-orange. In one farmyard, a tractor-tire on its side—painted white—had been filled with soil then white geraniums. Dusk now turned these all the colors of a campfire. Tidied fields shadowed toward something sinister. And should that huge a rooster be crowing right at sundown? In my corduroys’ pocket, just the two tens left. I’d had my fun but, as I sped through a pretty little town called La Verne, just as its Propane Gas Works and beauty parlor (itchily called LuAnn’s House o Hair) reverted to corn-green countryside, my Jeep banked a curve. I spied one abandoned grocery-gas-station. And against an eventide inked Disney red-green-gold, one colonial sign dangled. Its girlish freehand promised:

  Theodosia’s Antiques

  (REAL AND IMAGINED)

  Only Thing Reasonable Here?

  Our Prices

  “Well, hell. Somebody’s thinking,” I said aloud.

  I aimed my Jeep toward an unlit store that, up-close, looked out-of-business. I’d already popped my clutch to find reverse when I flicked on headlights, then high-beams, then braked. At eleven hundred hours? that cigar-store Indian thing bent in the window? with jewelry all over it? appeared either some dressmaker’s dummy or a possible human being. Oosh, it’d definitely moved. Was she crookbacked or polychromed? Then I noticed: her parking-lot showed no tire tracks since yesterday’s big rainstorm. Did she walk to work or s
leep, bat-like, inverted among her junk?

  “Evening.” I smiled through door-chimes’ sweet-and-sour tinkling. “You must be the eponymous The-o—”

  “Herself.” I warranted one courtly bitter nod.

  Caught hovering at her window, worried this might seem invitational, the owner must’ve made a fast crab-like retreat to one high stool. The climb still had her panting. She hovered behind one outmoded silver cash-register that itself appeared a costly toy, circa 1923.

  What had bent her so? Fever, birth-defect? Her spine showed the exact angle of an opened-safety-pin; the clasp, her hooded face. Body angles were reflected in the immense vitrine where she presided. (Most good antique stores offer one such holy-of-holies throne-bench. From there the owner presides over what little she can bear to study all day between visitors.)

  But Theodosia, weighing under ninety pounds, seemed to wear her best stuff. A county’s worth of brooch timepieces burdened the chest otherwise concave. Thirty watches pinned there, ladies’ ones, some clockfaces visible, others locketed away, a few on pulleys allowing easy consulting, quick return. Various metals glinted across her front like bogus German military decorations.

  Our professor gave us extra credit for what he called “five-finger discounts.” He’d assigned us Abbie Hoffman’s 1971 Steal This Book. (But someone had alerted the student store’s floorwalkers. They stood guard, making us feel grouchy and bourgeois paying retail.) I could never swipe a single trinket from owners of these funky last-chance shops. Each proprietor seemed a local maverick who—lacking the will to leave Mother’s cooking or some awful high school marriage—had settled for wearing the whimsical bowler hat indoors, had settled for hours with cast-off oddments at a dead town’s farthest edge.

  Day’s last stop, I quickly scanned, nose wrinkling. I sometimes imagined I could smell the hidden treasure. Where was “it”? I knew my Jeep-load would bring hoots in Monday’s class. But such rough-cut items felt too coarse to be the masterwork I always sought. Maybe it lurked within reach of this “it” girl, Theodosia. (Her given name? or one created by a novel-reading farm daughter, hoping to at least sound classier?)

  I noted how her thin hair, un-dyed, showed as many metal colors as her watches. She’d yanked hair then pinned that handful any old way behind. Her backbone might’ve been cruelly bowed, but deep-set eyes gleamed my way briar-sharp. Theodosia seemed one of those maimed or homely people who—feeling themselves un-improvable—make a militant point of glaring you down. Seated on-high, she flaunted her un-assets as a form of deficit flirting.

  Being twenty-six, I still likely looked my best. (I remained ignorant of face-value, even while trading on the bargains it brought. You only really notice your looks once you’ve lost them). Now, barging toward the poorest-lit corner of her two-roomed shop, I felt “it,” hiding. Ballroom chairs stacked to the ceiling. Narrow pathways corkscrewed tributes to her bent spine. Theodosia offered no chat, none of other clerks’ jolly prying: “So, where you folks say you’re from? You with the Depression Glass convention in Moline, betcha.” Nothing past her alum glaze, her arms crossed over six pounds of locket clocks.

  “Hope I’m not keeping you open right at closing time?” I risked, to no response.

  Things here did look finer than most shops’ out this way. And—a good sign—her place smelled, not of euphemizing potpourri, but of the proper musk peculiar to some dry attic’s last few centuries. And yet Theo’s major Gothic grandfather clock lacked one finial; three beautiful nineteenth century pumpkin-colored paisley shawls had been moth-dessert decades back. Nothing displayed justified full snootiness. I did stop before a pile of the 1860s Harper’s Weeklies. Hating knowing that she knew—I stood scouting for Winslow Homer’s war illustrations. Nothing.

  Her voice scratched me from a room away. “The toys are in that half-timbered neo-Tudor sideboard to your right, you.”

  I asked stale air before me, “How’d you know?”

  “You’re wearing the red. You toy people, cutthroat bunch, ofttimes wear the faded tin-toy reds in your reindeer sweater. Me, with so little else to do here, I’ve got it pretty much down to a system. Can identify all migrating birds, boy-o. I get three of you a day in here.”

  I doubted that but felt on notice.

  “Thanks,” I said, for spite.

  Theodosia’s toys proved familiar, overpriced, missing wheels, made in Munich or New York circa 1915 just before war claimed all such metal. —I found nothing local, handmade or heartfelt enough for my advanced urban taste.

  Last thing, headed for the Jeep, I, feeling as irked as stubborn, did squat before the clear vitrine and—through that, incidentally—noted her gold ballet slippers. Four minutes’ silence hadn’t thawed her. She still emitted the nunnish hauteur of some impoverished old countess out of Chekhov. Theodosia seemed to want me to despise her; she was certainly getting her way.

  “Hope I’m not holding up your evening plans, right here at six and all, ma’am,” so ran me in faux-farmboy mode. She just clicked like a time-bomb with brooch-clocks dragging down her blouse. In lieu of visible breasts, metals’ differing weights tugged starched fabric in ways uneven.

  It was only now—as I squatted before glass, peering over Grover Cleveland campaign buttons and crystal bulldog inkwells—I felt observed from floor-level. Beside her white shin, bruised along its central bone, one face—a force—stared back at me. This head-and-shoulders portrait rested on the floor. He must’ve been my age. Dark-eyes over a beginner’s goatee; he’d posed fastened in a black tie and high starched collar. His face was handsome if both blank and sad, hound-earnest.

  “So what’d be his story?” My index finger touched cold glass. I felt then in the knots of my stiff neck and impressionable groin, a collector’s sense that he might be today’s “it.”

  Silent, she studied her fingernails. Sales technique? Witch-orneriness? Both.

  “I asked: Tell me about this sweet guy in the painting nearest your left foot?” She kept fussing with an imagined hangnail. Why did her not answering mount up so? Unlike the last three shops, no radio played Champaign-Urbana’s classical FM. No noise out here past wind crossing her roof or the odd twist of carved wood popping in her far room. I felt foolish at the din my voice made in a building chockablock with clock-ticks of all sizes (her chest, a knitting-class of those).

  But I kept gazing through this glass box at one young gent’s melancholy message of a face…. Maybe he looked a bit like me—and being painted actual-size, given all the glass between us—became some sort of mirror? Maybe all bright young men, seriously questing at twenty-six, look a bit alike.

  The picture tipped half out of its 1850s rosewood frame. Canvas showed its age, some flaking. The oil-paint execution seemed able, even affectionate, if Midwesternly conventional; his background, solid black. But what held me was the boy’s expression. Not just an invitation, almost a plea for help. I felt first approached then nearly summoned. Didn’t understand quite what I’d found, but seeing him, I recognized some caliber of longing or emergency. The sole way I’d find out? Theodosia, on her high stool, fussing with one index nail.

  “Just want information, lady! But, why’m I even bothering you? As if you knew the slightest thing about him!” This is how one avid story-‘picker,’ holding only twenty bucks, challenges another.

  II.

  LOCKETS’ TICKING seemed the Geiger-counter minefield guarding her. Sunset, gold as egg-yolk, now scored with value many otherwise half-worthless things. Pot-lids, cuff links, rims of chipped Venetian claret glasses. She snorted finally: amused at anybody’s thinking Theodosia might not keep total-narrative-lock on every celluloid buttonhook in here.

  As her small mouth twisted tighter, as bone wrists drew nearer her waist, I thought I saw some bored amusement light her eyes’ fierce dots. (Since she belonged to my grandmother’s flapper generation, I’d maybe gauged her partly right: Such ladies were most charming when provoked. Women in love with standards, their own or just some mar
ked-down tradition’s.) When Theodosia’s voice at last emerged, it sounded adenoidal, dry, so ‘local,’ I felt disappointed.

  “You look to be one those ones I get in here from the grad school over to Iowa City. Printmaking department’s pretty good, they say. But why would anybody waste time doing prints when you could just paint? Yeah, real ‘artistes,’ you kids! You all look alike. Come out here huntin’ somethin’ for nothin’. You’ll get nothin’ for nothin’ in here, however well-off you like to think you look, son. From the parking-lot, I knew ye. Expensive haircut wanting to play like it just grew wild that way. Wearing clothes the people in New York City wore three years back. Ooh yeah, nosing out this far from Moline, hoping and trick us natives. One of you’s forever taking me aside, trying and get the real scoop. You’d probably make a funny story out of me, my shop, this poor boy painted here.”

  Now some test would be required. Proof I was not just another trust-fund tinhorn, condescending.

  And as I leaned nearer glass, I saw Theodosia smirking over secrets she felt enriched only by withholding. I ‘read’ her bony chest. Most clocks clamped there told roughly the same time (within fifty minutes). —But, scouted from left to right, four rows, top to bottom, her system started coming clearer: we begin with austere Federal design, chaste and ‘classical,’ till Ionic geometry blossomed, enlarging to certain manufactured over-elaborations of the 1850s, sprouting roses and leaves and fat gilt tendrils of prosperity, till this stylized itself toward a silver Nouveau calla lily then onward toward a watch mitered with onyx swallows and the chopped fan-lines of the Eastlake moment, slimming square again into industrial edginess as a Deco locket put end-punctuation to time’s weird progression across a pigeon-chest otherwise un-notable.

  “So,” I tilted up and spoke over the glass. “You’ve set yourself chronological, eh? ‘Chrono’ equals clocks. ‘Logical’ is … well, logical. Makes a certain ’mount of sense, I guess. So, you’ve come to work today dressed clock-logical as ‘1830 through 1930’?”