The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus Read online

  On Christmas Eve, she was determined to put up a tree for him. But Dad, somehow frightened by the ladder and all the unfamiliar boxes, got her into such a lethal headlock she had to scream for help. Now neighbors were involved. Now people I barely knew interrupted my office work, insisting, “Something’s got to be done. It took three of us to pull him off of her. Old guy’s still strong as a horse. It’s getting dangerous over there. He could escape.”

  Sometimes, at two in the morning, she’d find him standing in their closet, wearing his pj’s and the season’s correct hat. He’d be looking at his business suits. The right hand would be filing, “walking,” back and forth across creased pant legs, as if seeking the … exact … right … pair … for … the office … today.

  I tried to keep Miss Green informed. She’d sold her duplex and moved into our town’s most stylish old-age home. When she swept downstairs to greet me, I didn’t recognize her. “God, you look fifteen years younger.” I checked her smile for hints of a possible lift.

  She just laughed, giving her torso one mild shimmy. “Look, Ma. No shoulder pads.”

  Her forties hairdo with its banked rolled edges had softened into pretty little curls around her face. She’d let its color go her natural silvery blond. Green gave me a slow look. If I didn’t know her better, I’d have sworn she was flirting.

  She appeared shorter in flats. I now understood: her toes had been so mangled by wearing those Quonset-huts of high heels, ones she’d probably owned since age eighteen. Her feet had grown, but she’d stayed true to the old shoes, part of some illusion she felt my dad required.

  Others in the lobby perked at her fond greeting; I saw she’d already become the belle of this place. She let me inventory her updated charms.

  “No.” She smiled. “It’s that I tried to keep it all somewhat familiar for him. How I looked and everything. We got to where Mr. Markham found any change a kind of danger, so … I mean, it wasn’t as if a dozen other suitors were beating down my door. What with Mother being moody and sick that long. And so, day-to-day, well …” She shrugged.

  IV.

  NOW, IN MY LIFE I’ve had very few inspired ideas. Much of me, like Pop, is helplessly a company man. So forgive my boasting of this one, okay?

  Leaving Miss Green’s, I stopped by a huge Salvation Army store. It’s the best around. Over the years, I’ve found a few fine Federal side chairs and many a great tweed jacket. Browsing the used-furniture rooms, I wandered beneath a cardboard placard hand-lettered “The World of Early American.” Duck decoys and mantel clocks. Ladder-back deacon’s chairs rested knee to knee, like sad and separate families.

  I chanced to notice a homeless man, asleep, a toothless white fellow. His overcoat looked filthy. His belongings were bunched around him in six rubber-banded shoeboxes. His feet, in paint-stained shoes, rested on an ordinary school administrator’s putty-colored desk. The plaque overhead explained “The Wonderful World of Work.” His setting? a hand-me-down waiting room still waiting. Business furniture sat parlored gray-green as any Irish wake. There was something about this old guy’s midday snoring in so safe a make-work cubicle.

  Mom now used her sewing room just for those few overnight third cousins willing to endure its lumpy foldout couch. The place had become a catchall, cold storage, since about 1970. We waited for Dad’s longest nap of the day. Then, in a crazed burst of energy, we cleared her lair, purging it of boxes, photo albums, his-and-hers unused exercise machines. I paint-rolled its walls in record time, the ugliest latex junior-high-school green that Sherwin-Williams sells (there’s still quite a range). The Salvation Army delivers: within two days, I had arranged this new-used junk to resemble Integrity’s workspace, familiarly anonymous. A metal desk nuzzled one wall—the window wasted behind. Three green file cabinets made a glum herd. One swivel wooden chair rode squeaky casters. The hat rack antlered upright over a dented tin wastebasket. The ashtray looked big enough to serve an entire cancer ward. One wire shelf was labeled “In”; its larger mate promised a more optimistic “Out.” I stuffed desk drawers with bottled Parker ink, cheap fountain pens, yellow legal pads, six dozen paper clips. I’d bought a big black rotary phone, and Mom got him his own line.

  Against her wishes, I’d saved most of Dad’s old account ledgers. Yellowed already, they could’ve come from a barrister’s desk in some Dickens novel. I scattered “1959–62.” In one corner I piled all Dad’s boxed records, back taxes, Christmas cards from customers. The man saved everything.

  The evening before we planned introducing him to his new quarters, I disarranged things a bit. I tossed a dozen pages on the floor near his chair. I left the desk lamp lit all night. It gave this small room a strange hot smell, overworked. The lamp was made of a nubbly brown metal (recast war surplus?), its red button indicating “on.” Black meant “off.”

  That morning I was there to help him dress. Mom made us a hearty oatmeal breakfast, packed his lunch, and snapped the Tupperware insert into his briefcase.

  “And where am I going?” he asked us in a dead voice.

  “To the office,” I said. “Where else do you go this time of day?”

  He appeared sour, puffy, skeptical. Soon as I could, I glanced at Mom. This was not going to be as easy as we’d hoped.

  I got Dad’s coat and hat. He looked pale and dubious. He would never believe in this new space if I simply squired him down the hall to it. So, after handing him his case, I led Dad back along our corridor and out onto the street.

  Some of the old-timers, recognizing him, called, “Looking good, Mr. Markham,” or “Cold enough for you?” Arm in arm, we nodded past them.

  My grammar school had been one block from his office. Forty years back, we’d set out on foot like this together. The nearer Dad drew to Integrity, the livelier he became; the closer I got to school, the more withdrawn I acted. But today I kept up a mindless over-plentiful patter. My tone neither cheered nor deflected him. One block before his office building, I swerved back down an alley toward the house. As we approached, I saw that Mom had been imaginative enough to leave our front door wide open. She’d removed a bird print that had hung in our foyer hall, unloved forever. A mere shape, it still always marked this as our hall, our home.

  “Here we are!” I threw open his office door. I took his hat and placed it on its hook. I helped free him from his coat. Just as his face locked—bored, then irked, and finally enraged at our deception—the phone rang. From where I stood—half in the office, half in the hall—I could see Mom holding the kitchen’s white extension.

  My father paused—since when had a company president answered incoming calls?—but, flushed, he finally reached for it himself. “Dick?” Mom said. “You’ll hate me, I’m getting so absentminded. But you did take your lunch along today, right? I mean, go check. Be patient with me, okay?” Phone cradled between head and shoulder, he lifted his briefcase and snapped it open—his efficiency still water-clear, and scary. Dad then said to the receiver, “Lunch is definitely here, per usual. But, honey, what have I told you about personal calls at the office?”

  Then I saw him bend to pick up scattered pages. I saw him touch one yellow legal pad and start to square all desktop pens at sharp right angles. As he pulled the desk chair two inches forward, I slowly shut his door behind me. Then Mother and I, hidden in the kitchen, held each other and, not expecting it, cried, if very, very silently.

  When we peeked in two hours later, he was filing.

  Every morning, Sundays included, Dad walked to the office. Even our ruse of hiking him around the block was relaxed. Mom simply set a straw hat atop him (after Labor Day, she knew to switch to the gray). With his packed lunch, he would stride nine paces from the kitchen table, step in, and pull the door shut, muttering complaints of overwork, no rest ever.

  Dad spent a lot of time on the phone. Were his old colleagues and clients humoring him? Long-distance directory-assistance charges constituted a large part of his monthly bill. But he “came home” for supper with
the weary sense of blurred accomplishment we recalled from olden times.

  Once, having dinner with them, I asked Dad how he was faring. He sighed. “Well, July is peak for getting their school supplies ordered. So the pressure’s sure on. My heart’s not what it was, heart’s not completely in it lately, I admit. They downsized Green. Terrible loss to me. With its being crunch season, I get a certain shortness of breath. Suppliers aren’t where they were, the gear is often second-rate, little of it any longer American-made. But you keep going, because it’s what you know and because your clients count on you. I may be beat, but, hey—it’s still a job.”

  “Aha,” I said.

  Mom received a call on her own line. It was from some kindergarten owner. Dad—plundering his old red address book—had somehow made himself a go-between, arranging sales, but working freelance now. He appeared to be doing it unsalaried, not for whole school systems but for small local outfits like day-care centers. This teacher had to let Mom know that he’d sent too much of the paste. No invoice with it, a pallet of free jarred white school paste waiting out under the swing sets. Whom to thank?

  Once, I tiptoed in and saw a long list of figures he kept meaning to add up. I noticed that, in his desperate daily fight to keep his desktop clear, he’d placed seven separate five-inch piles of papers at evened intervals along the far wall. I found such ankle-level filing sad till I slowly recognized a pattern—oh yeah, the “Pile System.” It was my own technique for maintaining provisional emergency order, and one that I now re-judged to be quite sane.

  Inked directly into the wooden bottom of his top desk drawer was this:

  Check Green’s sick leave—too long. Nazis lost. Double enter all new receipts, nincompoop. Yes, you … eighty-one. Woman roommate: Betty.

  Mom felt safe holding bridge parties at the house again, telling friends that Dad was in there writing letters and doing paperwork, and who could say he wasn’t? Mom could now shop or attend master-point tournaments at good driving-distance hotels. In her own little kitchen-corner office, she entered bridge chat rooms, e-mailing game-theory arcana to well-known French and Russian players. She’d regained some weight and her face was fuller, and prettier for that. She bought herself a bottle-green velvet suit. “It’s just a cheap Chanel knockoff, but these ol’ legs still ain’t that bad, hmm?” She looked more rested than I’d seen her in a year or two.

  I cut a mail slot in Dad’s office door, and around eleven Mom would slip in the day’s Wall Street Journal. You’d hear him fall on it like a zoo animal, fed.

  V.

  SINCE DAD TRIED to break down the headhunters’ door I hadn’t dared go on vacation. But Mother encouraged me to take my family to Hawaii. She laughed. “Go ahead, enjoy yourself, for Pete’s sake. Everything is under control. I’m playing what friends swear is my best bridge ever, and Dick’s sure working good long hours again. By now I should know the drill, hunh?”

  I was just getting into my bathing suit when the hotel phone rang. I could see my wife and son down there on the white beach.

  “Honey? Me. There’s news about your father.”

  Mom’s voice sounded vexed but contained. Her businesslike tone seemed assigned. It let me understand.

  “When?”

  “This afternoon around six-thirty our time. Maybe it happened earlier, I don’t know. I found him. First I convinced myself he was just asleep. But I guess, even earlier, I knew.”

  I stood here against glass, on holiday. I pictured my father facedown at his desk. The tie still perfectly knotted, his hat yet safe on its hook. I imagined Dad’s head at rest atop those forty pages of figures he kept meaning to add up.

  I told Mom I was sorry; I said we’d fly right back.

  “Oh no, please,” she said. “I’ve put everything off till next week. It’s just us now. Why hurry? And, son? along with the bad news, I think there’s something good. —He died at the office.”

  UNASSISTED HUMAN FLIGHT

  MY FIRST NIGHT as cub-reporter and they send me to a four-hour County Sewage Hearing. I call that hazing. You try distilling lively prose from Waste Water Issues.

  To be safe, I wore my best blue thrift-shop blazer. But when I afterwards approached the Mayor, he clammed up. I asked one question but he heard: I lacked a brogue of sufficient Dixie humidity. He sensed this newbie knew nothing yet of hog prices, hurricane damage, proof the Presbyterian pastor kept an open tab at Discount Adult Art. Having been assigned a town of 6,000, I found its every citizen obsessed with one thing only: the other 5,999.

  And after five years’ reporting here? I talk slower, think faster, scratch anywhere. The blazer? long-since replaced with denim work-clothes. People here now know my name because I know theirs. And today, with regret, I leave Falls….

  This must be my last Herald Traveler column. Our editor has spent years slashing my discursive if clarion copy. He’s presently vacationing at Myrtle Beach. Mel has finally agreed to let me “go long.” He left one urgent Post-it, “If need be, cut the issue’s ‘Classifieds.’ But ‘Recent Arrests’ and the Hardee’s ads are sacred, got it?”

  I’ve been summoned to Richmond’s big-league paper from this noble farm team. Let me thank you, reader, for your patience in watching a boy from Akron come to consciousness in stark civic view. You have been patient as my accent lost its harder corners. Consonants now sound Midwestern. The South is all nougat vowel.

  This much I have learned from Falls, NC: Whatever story the Herald sent me out to cover, was never the one locals tried telling me instead.

  —Today’s column finally gives the people what they want. This is the tale Falls has pleaded for these five years: a secret “miracle” too-long-ignored. My last seven weeks have been taken up with the sad facts of the Mahon family drowning. If the reader is tired of this tragic event, imagine how Falls’ feature writer feels. In brief, the Mahons, farmers long established in our county, inherited a motorboat. It arrived at night and the father and mother and five children decided to take said craft for a test spin in their farm’s biggest irrigation pond. The eldest son had brought his pistol. He intended to fire off a traditional New Year’s Eve round overhead. Somehow the gun discharged into the bottom of the fiberglass boat. No one was hurt but bullets shattered the craft’s underside. This would have meant nothing if any of the Mahons could swim. Shortly after the pistol fired, their motor stalled and, out that far on water after midnight, the thing slowly sank. Since the nearest neighbors live three miles away, no shouts were heard. Come morning, only a boat trailer hinted what had happened. The Mahon drowning seemed the last tale I would tell here. Then the one printed below took me—after the dredging misery of the Mahon deaths—to heights un-guessed.

  This morning I and my cat (named “Inkjet,” enemy of sparrows, five years chunkier) head north, leaving behind the story I feel proudest of. It proved my hardest interview to land but the easiest to remember.

  HOW HIS TALE RECRUITED ME

  A SHORT OLD WHITE MAN hoisted one thrashing catfish. It hung alongside him nearly half his length, black as motor oil. I photographed these two.

  “You think this fish is something? Know who your paper keeps missing? ‘Miracle Boy.’ Not even my catch here can touch him. Imagine a local human flying. Thirty-odd years back one naked boy ‘flew’ most of a mile. No fake wings. No helium or nothing. The sky someway took him in, then coughed him back down alive. I swear.

  “Your editor made you drive clear out here, son. Why? To report my hooking this forty-four-pounder. (True, my wife did phone the paper. And, sure, this creature fought me something fierce for almost twenty-six minutes. The wife camcorded every single second. And she will show you, if I don’t walk you clear back to your pickup.)

  “But you need to be writing about the strangest thing ever happened this far down Rodgers Road. The boy that survived his flying? He’s up around forty now. Still paying taxes, still pulling for ‘State.’ He could tell you it. But you’ll likely have to trick him. Usually Larry won’t talk a
bout it. Can’t, maybe.

  “One naked twin, about age eight? he drowned. Was the second brother flew into the sky. It’s the sky-one is still alive. ‘Miracle Boy’ stayed airborne whole minutes. (Wish Annie’d filmed that.) His name is Larry A. Winstead. The twin that died? now, that one was ‘Barry.’ Barry went under. But Larry? went up. —Don’t stare like I’m a senile. Phone him, son. (—No, Annie. Our boy-reporter does not need your whole film of me landing this monster…. Maybe just the highlight reel.)”

  Since then, Larry-Winstead-flight-facts reached me almost monthly. But I admit to feeling ever-more-skeptical. Features editors on papers this small must be gluttons for local color. (Didn’t I offer that hard-hitting two-part-series regarding the history of our Pun’kin Festival?) —But un-winged human air travel? For a documentarian like me, without supporting footage or some talkative surviving Icarus, that sounded hard to ever verify.

  Still, flight info kept finding me. Into the paper’s downtown office walked a recent bride’s brisk mother. She’d come to retrieve wedding-photos from our paper’s Society Editor (me also). This lady was unusual in seeming pleased with my nuptial coverage. She had even sent me a monogrammed note and some folding money.

  A prosperous farmer’s wife, she attends the society church in town. Being upwardly mobile might show in her preference for four-inch heels. This day she sported pearls, a lace collar, one small hat that clamped. While dictating her address for mailing purposes, she mentioned Rodgers Road. This somehow recalled to her a certain unique neighbor. She said she still owed me a favor. She admitted she’d gotten emotional when my wedding coverage mentioned bridesmaids’ peau de soie. In the Herald Traveler, famous for typos, I’d also spelled it right. So, indebted, this lady started in the middle, saying a nude child had been jerked up into quite a wind, like the one that took Dorothy clear to Oz, and did I even know? Had my advanced degree in journalism left me too sophisticated to recognize an act of God?