The Spectator Bird Read online

  “They fight for the privilege,” Ben said. “What are you doing, waiting for the mailman?”

  “What else do you do for the damned mailman, except give him five dollars at Christmas?”

  “Ruth home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Edith wants to see her a minute. Edith, why don’t you take the car and go on up? Ill sit down here and console Joe.”

  Edith, who had been looking off down the creek, turned her black windows again. The molded mouth and nose and cheeks below them were expressionless. She nodded, and as Ben got out, helping himself with a cane, she slid over, put the car in gear, quirked her mouth in the slightest of smiles, and drove on. Ben stood with his cane planted and both hands stacked on it and looked down on me from his stooped six feet five.

  “I wanted to ask but didn’t quite dare,” I said. “How’s Tom?”

  “He’s a dead man. I’ve just been down at the clinic with Edith while she heard it from Arthur.”

  “Oh, Christ I thought she was being pretty silent.”

  “She’s all right You know what she wants to see Ruth about?”

  “What?”

  “To tell her she can’t play the piano for the shut-ins for a while. Wants to arrange for someone else.”

  I thought about how much my mind would be on those shut-ins if I’d just got Edith’s news. “That’s touching,” I said. “Does Tom know?”

  “He’s known for a week. I talked with him.” The gray corkscrews of hair stood up on his head. The breath he breathed down on me was loud and sour. “We both thought it was better she should hear it from his doctor. Tom couldn’t quite tell her. That’s a very close marriage.”

  “I guess,” I said. “They’re always so composed about everything you get to thinking of them as unflappable.”

  A little gust of wind came up the valley, the roadside darkened under a swift cloud shadow. I rubbed my goose-pimpled arms. “Well, damn everything,” I said. “Damn the clouds. Damn the dawdling mailman. Damn the collective carcinogens. How do doctors stand being always cheek by jowl with the grim reaper?”

  “Death?” Ben said, surprised. “Death isn’t that much of a problem. It’s as natural as living, and just as easy, once you’ve accepted it. I’ve been dead twice myself. Both times when they hooked up my pacemaker I died on them, and they revived me.”

  “Well, at least your book on old age has a logical ending.”

  I must have sounded bitter, because he fixed his old medical eyes on me again. “I haven’t seen you around much lately. What’ve you been doing?”

  “Tending my garden.”

  “You ought to wear a sweater in this kind of weather. Been having any more pain?”

  “Who told you I’d been having any pain?”

  “Your doctor,” Ben said. “To whom I referred you. I looked at your last tests. Jim thought he might have depressed you with that diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis. Did he?”

  “Depressed me? No. I didn’t exactly cheer, but I wouldn’t say I’m depressed.”

  “What’s he giving you?”

  “Allopurinol for the uric acid, indocin for the pain, synthroid for general metabolic reasons, oronase for the blood sugar, something else for the cholesterol, I forget its name. I just take the handful of pills Ruth hands me.”

  “I forget, have you got a heart history?”

  “Myocarditis once, years ago. Or pericarditis, endocarditis, nobody ever quite labeled it. I got these chest pains, and the electrocardiograph went crazy, and I dropped about twenty pounds. They kept me in bed and it went away after a while.”

  It was just like his office. He made me feel defensive, standing there planted on his cane and scowling at me. He grunted and wheezed, and again I smelled his sour breath. It annoyed me to have this giant ruin acting as if he was immune and immortal, and probing around in my insides, when he was ten years closer to the edge than I was. Sure enough, he undertook to reassure me.

  “That’s one thing that suggests rheumatoid to Jim, that myocarditis,” he said. “It’s associated with rheumatoid the way rheumatic fever’s related to coronary disease. But I don’t necessarily believe he’s right. Lemme see your hands.” He examined the knuckles of the hand I held out, then ordered up and examined the other. He did not say what the inspection told him. “Even if he should be right,” he said, “you’re not to worry yourself into a wheel chair.”

  “I’m not worrying.”

  Wheezy and loud, his voice rode over mine. We stood in the green angle of the roadways, with the creek rustling in its deep channel, as if we were engaged in a quarrel that we didn’t quite want to make plain. “Diseases don’t live up to their full potential any oftener than people do,” he said. “You’ve got at most one chance in five it will really cripple you. You get plenty of exercise?”

  “We walk, I work in the yard.”

  “Good. You’re in good shape. You’ll make it into the eighties.”

  “Why, thanks, Doctor,” I said. “I appreciate the offer.”

  That old reptilian eye again, a snort through the long nose. “You know what you’ve got? You’ve got a bad case of the sixties. The sixties are the age of anxiety. You feel yourself on the brink of old age, and you fret. Once you pass your seventieth birthday that all clears away. You’re like a man with an old car and no place in particular to go. You drive it where you want to, and every day it keeps on running is a gift. If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with a sensible diet and regular exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever. Strictly speaking, there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as old age. You can keep chicken tissues alive indefinitely in a nutrient broth.”

  “You know, it’s a funny thing,” I said, “I never had the slightest desire to live in a nutrient broth.”

  I exasperated him. “You’re bored with your garden. If I’d been there when God set Adam and Eve in that perfect place I’d have given them about four months. They’d have lasted longer in Las Vegas. Who do you see? Who are your friends, besides the ones I know?”

  “Have you been talking to Ruth?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “No. But she has this notion you do, that I need more people around. I never have needed many people around. I always had more than I wanted. A few friends are enough. There are lots of perfectly pleasant people whom I like, but if I don’t see them I don’t miss them. What kept me in New York was work, not people. When the work ended, most of the people ended, all but the handful that meant something. Maybe that’s alarming, but that’s the way I am.”

  “All right,” Ben said. “Some are. You don’t have to start going to Arthur Murray. But I’m not kidding, old age is too God damned often self-inflicted. You don’t want to turn into a hermit saving string and bottle tops and running the neighbor kids out of your yard. Come out more. Come to lunch with me.”

  “Sure, any time.”

  “I’ll call you. And for God’s sake don’t go thinking yourself into any God damned wheel chair!” He reversed his cane and thumped me for emphasis on the breastbone and almost knocked me down.

  “What the hell is that, a shillelagh?”

  “Haven’t I shown you that?” He held it up. To the shaft, which looked like cherry wood, had been fastened this big bone, obviously the ball of the ball and socket joint of some large animal. The knob was the size of a handball, with a frill of bone around its base and a two-inch shank of bone projecting from that and bound to the wood with a wide silver band. As the finial of the polished, elegant stick of wood the handle was grotesque, the sort of thing any self-respecting dog would bury and never go back to.

  “That’s my hip joint,” Ben said. “When I broke my hip, and they had me in the operating room, the last thing I said to the surgeon was, ‘Doctor, save me that joint, I want it’ I’d walked on it for seventy-nine years and I damn well wanted to go on walking on it”

  By then I was laughing an
d holding my nose and pushing away the cane that he held up in my face. The thing looked as if it might smell. “Couldn’t you at least have left it out in the sun to bleach?” I said. “That’s an awful brown untoothsome-looking bone.”

  “That’s a sound bone. When I saw it I was proud, by God. Look at it. No spurs, no decalcification, no nothing. Except for that fall, it would have lasted me a lifetime.”

  The white convertible eased into sight around the corner of the hill by Hammonds’. “Here comes Edith,” I said. “Do I act as if I know?”

  He considered only a second. “I wouldn’t. If it was me, I wouldn’t hide it But she’s like you, she’d rather go off by herself and grit her teeth.”

  She pulled up, impassive behind the glasses, her flat cheeks looking deceptively young, her mouth fixed in the usual expression of remote and forgiving amusement. Ben opened the door, she slid over, he got in and threw the cane into the back seat “Think about it,” he said. “I’ll call you for lunch one of these days.” They lifted their hands and drove off, and I sat down again on the bridge timbers.

  I don’t respond gladly when other people show a willingness to direct my life, routines, or feelings. Ben has a way of making me feel about fifteen years old, an age that appeals to me even less than sixty-nine. He never doubted himself in his life. He is one of those people, insufferable when you think about them, who have always been able to do exactly what they set out to do. The son of a China missionary, he came to California without a dollar, determined to become a doctor. He became one, a very good one, some people think a great one. Even yet, when he has all but quit practicing, people come from a long way off to be treated by him. He has doctored everybody from Admiral Nimitz to Angela Davis, he has more celebrities in his files than I have, and on more intimate terms. I have only read their manuscripts and taken them to lunch and prepared their contracts and advanced them money and bailed them out of difficulties. He has examined their prostates, or the equivalent.

  Wanting money, he made it, made two or three million dollars. And give him credit, he practices what he preaches. When he built his big house in six hundred acres of foothills he didn’t retire, he pulled the world out to him. It is about as secluded as Vandenberg Air Force Base. Two or three nights a week his Chinese couple serve dinner to twenty or so people, the kind of people who have been everywhere and done everything. From his little vineyard Ben makes every year a thousand bottles of extraordinary Cabernet Sauvignon. He is a director in a half dozen Peninsula electronics firms, he has served on a half dozen presidential commissions, he owns vineyards in Sonoma and ranches in Mendocino County, and he collects things—friends, books, money, limericks, dirty stories—the way an air filter collects lint.

  Also, I was thinking as I sat on my splintery 8×8 beam, he is one of the few men I know thoughtful enough to go down with Edith Patterson while she received her husband’s death sentence, or take a few minutes to read the lab tests of Joe Allston, a crybaby former patient, and make a special trip out to calm his mind.

  Grit my teeth, did I? The hell I did. I complained by withdrawal and irritability and silence. Ten minutes with Ben Alexander and I was resolving to quit being a sissy about growing old.

  Eventually the mailman’s red, white, and blue truck came in, and the mailman, as cheerful as if he had been on time, handed me out a little bundle. Most of the letters, as usual, were addressed to Boxholder or Resident. Those that were not seemed to be appeals. That is another symptom of retirementitis, the way the mail decreases in amount and significance. I put the bundle in my right-hand pocket and walked back up the lane, reading as I walked, and transferring the read items to the pocket on the other side.

  2

  Enter the unexpected—and I dislike the unexpected, as the man said, unless I have had a chance to prepare for it. The fourth item I took out of my pocket was a postcard, closely written, and forwarded from our New York address of nine years ago. At the bottom of the hill, at the last edge of sun, in the smell of crushed eucalyptus buttons, I stopped and read it.

  Dear Friends—

  How are you? It is so long a time ! Just outside this village, which you know, I am living a quiet life. My husband did suffer a stroke and I moved him here to a house which Eigil gives us. He is like a child, he takes much care. The castle is as you saw it, no better—I see only Manon. But we have nothing and cannot choose. I had to sell even my little Ellebacken cottage, which I loved. But here where I grew up it is also beautiful. I walk and paint. Last month I had an exhibition in Copenhagen and sold nearly all. Often I wonder about you, if you have found your safe place. I wish much happiness to you both.

  Fondly,

  Astrid W/K

  The other side of the card was a color photograph, taken from a high place, of a neat red-roofed village set between fields and woods at the edge of a tame sea. A boat harbor extended masonry arms into the water beyond warehouses and sheds. A little green island was afloat offshore.

  Bregninge. I am related to it, or once thought I was. I know that estate, which includes two other villages, the harbor, the warehouses, a thousand acres or so of planted pinewoods, orchards, fields, and an English park modeled on that of Warwick Castle, where peacocks parade around the lawns under oaks that anywhere else in Denmark would have been cut down a century ago. I know the castle, too, a real slot, none of your mere thirty-bedroom manor houses, and I know some of its history, which is enough to put your pyloric caecum into spasm.

  So that was where she ended. I was not really surprised. That was settled on Midsummer Night twenty years ago. She would now be sixty, Edith Patterson’s age. A quiet life, looking after a helpless husband, in her one available safe place. She might live to be my age—ten more years of ebb—or Ben Alexander’s, twenty. She might live, like her grandmother, to be nearly a hundred.

  When I got to the house, Ruth was sunning in the protected front patio. “Isn’t it a funny day?” she said. “It’s so chilly when the sun goes under, and so warm when it’s out.”

  “Bolts and jolts. What did Edith want?”

  “She can’t play for the shut-ins for a while. She and Tom are going somewhere.”

  No confidences, then. So be it.

  “When do you want lunch?”

  “Not right away, I guess. Can we wait till one? I’d like to go back down and work a little more.”

  “Fine,” she said, pleased, and took the mail I handed her—without the postcard—and turned herself to pondering the needs of Boys’ Town, the NAACP, and the Association for the American Indian.

  I went down to the study and rummaged around in boxes until I found the diary I had kept, away back when I was sick and stuck in the sand and trying to winch myself out. It was written in three stenographic notebooks bound together with rubber bands that snapped when I stretched them. Thumbing the pages, I saw names I had entirely forgotten, places I didn’t ever recall visiting, references to feelings I would have sworn I never felt. It was like a letter from a dead Joe Allston to the one who survives, and it dealt—I knew it did before I read it, that’s why I went looking for it—with existential problems: Who am I? How to be? What is the meaning of everything?

  I started to read from the beginning, and it began to come back. Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old. geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years. When you hand him a problem he doesn’t come back with a cartful and dump it before you, a jackpot of instant retrieval. He finds one thing, which reminds him of another, which leads him off to the annex, which directs him to the east wing, which sends him back two tiers from where he started. Bit by bit he finds you what you want, but like his boss who seems to be under pressure to examine his life, he takes his time.

  Also, what
he brings is not necessarily pleasant. It is a little like taking the top off the jar and letting the tarantula out, and not too unlike opening a grave. Alas, poor Allston. I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, but now strangely chapfallen.

  Lunch interrupted me before I got past the first notebook. In the afternoon there were errands in town, some plants to be set out, some firewood to cut—routines, I realize, with which I fence my life in away from the mankillers. Then a shower, then a drink, then Cronkite like a ghostly cricket creakeen where a house was burned, then dinner, then the dishes, and finally the bedroom, which is where we really live. There, Ruth in bed and I in the big chair, two old parties in a warm well-lighted room, with the television standing by in case there should be something on worth watching, and the rest of the house dark and turned down in deference to that new American phenomenon, the shortage, we settled down for the evening, without interruption except when one or the other of us threw off old Catarrh, the Siamese, who at the age of ninety or so by human standards needs warmth too, and loves to creep up under your chin to sleep, and is never happier than when he is lying on your book.

  Ruth is quiet and contented with her reading, but I am not. Until recently—until, in fact, the machinery began to show signs of wear—the Joe Allston sitting there reading the diary of his predecessor has been pretending to be Marcus Aurelius, or the Cicero of “De Senectute”: stoic philosopher surprised by nothing, accepting everything, valuing only friendship, abstract integrity, and the cup that warms. Nil admirari and memento mori and all that. Take gratefully any pleasures the world provides, but don’t curse God when they fail. Nobody in the universe ever promised you anything. Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of a life amount not to wisdom but to scar tissue and callus.