Novelties Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction Read online

  “So the kid’s point of view against—”

  “No, no. What I would do, see, to get around this contradiction between the real church and this other church I seemed to experience physically and emotionally, is to reimagine the Catholic Church as another kind of church altogether, a very subtle and wise church, that understood all these feelings; a church that was really—secretly—about these things in fact, and not what it seemed to be about; and then pretend, in the book, that the church I grew up in was that church.”

  “You’re going to invent a whole new religion?”

  “Well, not exactly. It would just be a matter of shifting emphasis, somehow, turning a thing a hundred and eighty degrees…”

  “Well, how? Do you mean ‘books in the running brooks, sermons in stones,’ that kind of thing? Pantheism?”

  “No. No. The opposite. In that kind of religion the trees and the sky and the weather stand for God or some kind of supernatural unity. In my religion, God and all the rituals and sacraments would stand for the real world. The religion would be a means of perceiving the real world in a sacramental way. A Gnostic ascension. A secret at the heart of it. And the secret is—everything. Common reality. The day outside the church window.”

  “Hm.”

  “That’s what it would really have been about from the beginning. And only seemed to be about these divine personages, and stuff, and these rules.”

  She nodded slowly in a way that showed she followed him but frankly saw no novel. He went on, wanting at least to say it all before he no longer saw it with this clarity. “The priests and nuns would know this was the case, the wisest of them, and would guide the worshipers—the ones they thought could grasp it—to see through the paradox, to see that it is a paradox: that only by believing, wholly and deeply, in all of it could you see through it one day to what is real—see through Christmas to the snow; see through the fasting, and the saints’ lives, and the sins, and Baby Jesus walking through the snow every Christmas night ringing a little bell—”

  “What?”

  “That was a story one nun told. That was a thing she said was the case.”

  “Good heavens. Did she believe it?”

  “Who knows? That’s what I’m getting at.”

  She broke into her eggs Florentine with a delicate fork. The two chapters, full of meat; the spinach of an outline. She was very attractive in a coltish, aristocratic way, with a rosy flush on her tanned cheeks that was just the flush his wife’s cheeks had had. No doubt still had; no doubt.

  “Like Zen,” he said desperately. “As though it were a kind of Zen.”

  V

  Well, he had known as well as she that it was no novel, no matter that it importuned him, reminding him often of its deep truth to his experience, and suggesting shyly how much fun it might be to manipulate, what false histories he could invent that would account for the church he imagined. But he had it now; now the world began to turn beneath him firmly, both rotating and revolving; it was quite clear now.

  The theme would not be religion at all, but this ancient conflict between novelty and security. This theme would be embodied in the contrasted adventures of a set of characters, a family of Catholic believers modeled on his own. The motion of the book would be the sense of a holy thing ripening in the stream of time, that is, the seasons; and the form would be a false history or mirror-reversal of the world he had known and the church he had believed in.

  Absurdly, his heart had begun to beat fast. Not years from now, not months, very soon, imaginably soon, he could begin. That there was still nothing concrete in what he envisioned didn’t bother him, for he was sure this scheme was one that would generate concreteness spontaneously and easily. He had planted a banner amid his memories and imaginings, a banner to which they could all repair, to which they were repairing even now, primitive clans vivified by these colors, clamoring to be marshaled into troops by the captains of his art.

  It would take a paragraph, a page, to eliminate, say, the Reformation, and thus make his church infinitely more aged, bloated, old in power, forgetful of dogmas long grown universal and ignorable, dogmas altered by subtle subversives into their opposites, by a brotherhood within the enormous bureaucracy of faith, a brotherhood animated by a holy irony and secret as the Rosicrucians. Or contrariwise: he could pretend that the Reformation had been more nearly a complete success than it was, leaving his Roman faith a small, inward-turning, Gnostic sect, poor and not grand, guiltless of the Inquisition; its pope itinerant or in shabby exile somewhere (Douai, or Alexandria, or Albany); through Appalachia a poor priest travels from church to church, riding the circuit in an old Studebaker as rusty black as his cassock, putting up at a plain frame house on the outskirts of town, a convent. The wainscoted parlor is the nuns’ chapel, and the pantry is full of their canning; in autumn the broken stalks of corn wither in their kitchen garden. “Use it up, wear it out,” says the proverb of their creed (and not that of splendid and orgulous Protestants), “make it do, do without”: and they possess themselves in edge-worn and threadbare truth.

  Yes! The little clapboard church in Kentucky where his family had worshiped, in the Depression, amid the bumptious Baptists. In the hastening dawn he had walked a mile to serve six o’clock mass there. In winter the stove’s smell was incense; in summer it was the damp odor of morning coming through the lancet windows, opened a crack to reveal a band of blue-green day beneath the feet of the saints fragilely pictured there in imitation stained glass. The three or four old Polish women always present always took Communion, their extended tongues trembling and their veined closed eyelids trembling, too; and though when they rose crossing themselves they became only unsanctified old women again, he had for a moment glimpsed their clean pink souls. There were aged and untended rosebushes on the sloping lawn of the big gray house he had grown up in—his was by far the best off of any family in that little parish—and when the roses bloomed in May the priest came and the familiar few they saw in church each week gathered, and the Virgin was crowned there, a Virgin pink and blue and white as the rose-burdened day, the best lace tablecloth beneath her, strange to see that domestic lace outdoors edge-curled by odorous breezes and walked on by bugs. He caught himself singing:

  O Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today

  Queen of the Angels

  Queen of the May

  Of course he would lose by this scheme a thousand other sorts of memories just as dear, would lose the grand and the fatuous baroque, mitered bishops in jewel-encrusted copes and steel-rimmed eyeglasses; but the point was not nostalgia and self-indulgence after all, no, the opposite; in fact there ought to be some way of tearing the heart completely out of the old religion, or to conceive on it something so odd that no reader would ever confuse it with the original, except that it would be as concrete, its concreteness the same concreteness (which was the point…) And what then had been that religion’s heart?

  What if his Jesus hadn’t saved mankind?

  What if the Renaissance, besides uncovering the classical past, had discovered evidence—manuscripts, documentary proofs (incontrovertible, though only after terrible struggles)—that Jesus had in the end refused to die on the cross? Had run away; had abjured his Messiah-hood; and left his followers then to puzzle that out. It would not have been out of cowardice, exactly, though the new New Testaments would seem to say so, but (so the apologetic would come to run) out of a desire to share our human life completely, even our common unheroic fate. Because the true novelty, for God, would lie not in the redemption of men—an act he could perform with a millionth part of the creative effort he had expended in creating the world—but in being a human being entire, growing old and impotent to redeem anybody, including himself. Something like that had happened with the false messiah Sevi in the seventeenth century: his Messiah-hood spread quickly and widely through the whole Jewish world; then, at the last minute, threatened with death, he’d converted to Islam. His followers mostly fell away, but a few still bel
ieved, and their attempts to figure out how the Messiah could act in that strange way, redeem us by not redeeming us, yielded up the Hassidic sect, with its Kabbalah and its paradoxical parables, almost Zenlike; very much what he had in mind for his church.

  “A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief”—the greatest grief, far greater than a few moments’ glorious pain on that Tree. Mary’s idea of it was that in the end the Father was unable to permit the death of his only begotten son; the prophecy is Abraham and Isaac; she interceded for him, of course, her son, too, as she still intercedes for each of us. Perhaps he resented it. In any case he outlived her, and his own wife and son, too; lived on, a retired carpenter, in his daughter’s house; and the rabble came before his door, and they mocked him, saying: If thou art the Christ, take up thy cross.

  Weird! But, but—what made him chuckle and nearly smack his lips (in full boil now)—the thing would be, that his characters would pursue their different destinies completely oblivious of all this oddity, oblivious, that is, that it is odd; the narrative voice wouldn’t notice it either; their Resurrection has always been this ambiguous one, this Refusal; their holy-card of Jesus in despised old age (after Murillo) has always marked the Sundays in their missals; their church is just the old, the homely, the stodgy great Security, Peter’s rock, which his was. His priest would venture out (bored, restless) from that security into the strange and the dangerous, at first only wishing to be a true priest, then for their own sakes, for the adventure of understanding. A nun: starting from a wild embracing of all experience, anything goes, she passes later into quietness and, well, into habit. His wife would have to sit for that portrait, of course, of course; though she wouldn’t sit still. The two meet after long separation, only to pass each other at the X-point, coming from different directions, headed for different heavens—a big scene there. A saint: but which one? He or she? Well, that had always been the question; neither, or both, or one seeing at last after the other’s death his sainthood, and advocating it (in the glum Vatican, a Victorian pile in Albany, the distracted pope), a miracle awaited and given at last, unexpectedly, or not given, withheld—oh, hold on, he asked, stop a minute, slow down. He plucked out and lit a cigarette with care. He placed his glass more exactly in the center of its cardboard coaster and arranged his change in orbits around it.

  Flight over. Cats, though. He would appropriate for his Jesus that story about Muhammad called from his couch, tearing off his sleeve rather than disturbing the cat that had fallen asleep on it. A parable. Did Jews keep cats then? Who knows.

  Oh God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning…. Noparagraph, no phrase even of the thousands the book must contain could strike a discordant note, be less than fully imagined, an entire novel’s worth of thought would have to be expended on each one. His attention had only to lapse for a moment, between preposition and object, colophon and chapter heading, for dead spots to appear like gangrene that would rot the whole. Silkworms didn’t work as finely or as patiently as he must, and yet boldness was all, the large stroke, the end contained in and prophesied by the beginning, the stains of his clouds infinitely various but all signifying sunrise. Unity in diversity, all that guff. An enormous weariness flew over him. The trouble with drink, he had long known, wasn’t that it started up these large things but that it belittled the awful difficulties of their execution. He drank, and gazed out into the false golden day, where a passage of girl students in plaid uniforms was just then occurring, passing secret glances through the trick mirror of the window.

  VI

  “I’m such a chicken,” the woman said to Victor. “The other day they were going around at work signing people up for the softball team. I really wanted to play. They said come on, come on, it’s no big deal, it’s not professional or anything…”

  “Sure, just fun.”

  “I didn’t dare.”

  “What’s to dare? Just good exercise. Fresh air.”

  “Sure, you can say that. You’ve probably been playing all your life.” She stabbed at the last of her ice with a stirring-stick. “I really wanted to, too. I’m such a chicken.”

  Play right field, he wanted to advise her. That had always been his retreat, nothing much ever happens in right field, you’re safe there mostly unless a left-handed batter gets up, and then if you blow one, the shame is quickly forgotten. He told himself to say to her: You should have volunteered for right field. But his throat said it might refuse to do this, and his pleasantry could come out a muffled croak, watch out. She had finished her drink; how much time did he have to think of a thing to say to her? Buy her a drink: the sudden offer always made him feel like a masher, a cad, something antique and repellent.

  “You should have volunteered for right field,” he said.

  “Oh, hi,” she said. “How’s the writing coming?”

  “What?”

  “The last time we talked you were writing a novel.”

  “Oh. Well, I sort of go in spurts.” He couldn’t remember still that he had ever talked with her, much less what imaginary novel he had claimed to be writing.

  “It’s like coming into a cave here,” she said, raising her glass, empty now except for the rounded remains of ice. “You can’t see anything for a while. Because of the sun in your eyes. I didn’t recognize you at first.” The ice she wanted couldn’t escape from the bottom of the glass till she shook the glass briskly to free it; she slid a piece into her mouth then and crunched it heedlessly (a long time since he’d been able to do that) and drew her skirt away from the stool beside her, which he had come to occupy.

  “Will you have another?”

  “No, nope.” They smiled at each other, each ready to go on with this if the other could think of something to go on with.

  “So,” he said.

  “Taking a break?” she said. “Do you write every day?”

  “Oh, no. Oh, I sort of try. I don’t work very hard, really. Really I’m on vacation. All the time. Or you could say I work all the time, too. It comes to the same thing.” He’d said all this before, to others; he wondered if he’d said it to her. “It’s like weekend homework. Remember? There wasn’t ever a time you absolutely had to do it—there was always Saturday, then Sunday—but then there wasn’t ever a time when it wasn’t there to do, too.”

  “How awful.”

  Sunday dinner’s rich odor declining into stale leftoverhood: was it that incense that made Sunday Sunday, or what? For there was no part of Sunday that was not Sunday; even if, rebelling, you changed from Sunday suit to Saturday jeans when dinner was over, they felt not like a second skin, like a bold animal’s useful hide, as they had the day before, but strange, all right but wrong to flesh chafed by wool, the flannel shirt too smooth, too indulgent after the starched white. And upstairs—though you kept as far from them as possible, that is, facedown and full-length on the parlor carpet, head inches from the funnies—the books and blue-lined paper waited.

  “It must take a lot of self-discipline,” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have much.” He felt himself about to say again, and unable to resist saying, that “Dumas, I think it was Dumas, some terrifically prolific Frenchman, said that writing novels is a simple matter—if you write one page a day, you’ll write one novel a year, two pages a day, two novels a year, three pages, three novels, and so on. And how long does it take to cover a page with writing? Twenty minutes? An hour? So you see. Very easy really.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, laughing. “I can’t even bring myself to write a letter.”

  “Oh, now that’s hard.” Easiest to leave it all just as it had been, and only inveigle into it a small sect of his own making…easiest of all just to leave it. It was draining from him, like the suits of the bathing beauties pictured on trick tumblers, to opposite effect. Self-indulgence only, nostalgia, pain of loss for what had not ever been worth saving: the self-indulgence of a man come to that time when the poignance of memory is his sharpest sensation, grown sharp
as the others have grown blunt. The journey now quite obviously more than half over, it had begun to lose interest; only the road already traveled still seemed full of promise. Promise! Odd word. But there it was. He blinked, and having fallen rudely silent, said. “Well, well, well.”

  “Well,” she said. She had begun to gather up the small habitation she had made before her on the bar, purse and open wallet, folded newspaper, a single unblown rose he hadn’t noticed her bring in. “I’d like to read your book sometime.”

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s not very good. I mean, it has some nice things in it, it’s a good little story. But it’s nothing really.”

  “I’m sure it’s terrific.” She spun the rose beneath her nose and alighted from her stool.

  “I happen to have a lot of copies. I’ll give you one.”

  “Good. Got to go.”

  On her way past him she gave the rose to Victor without any other farewell. Once again sun described her long legs as she crossed the floor (sun lay on its boards like gilding, sun was impartial), and for a moment she paused, sun-blinded maybe, in the garish lozenge of real daylight made when she opened the door. Then she reappeared in the other afternoon of the window. She raised her hand in a command, and a cab the color of marigolds appeared before her as though conjured. A flight of pigeons filled up the window all in an instant, seeming stationary there like a sculpted frieze, and then just as instantly didn’t fill it up anymore.

  “Crazy,” Victor said.

  “Hm?”

  “Crazy broad.” He gestured with the rose toward the vacant window. “My wife. You married?”

  “I was. Like the pumpkin eater.” Handsome guy, Victor, in a brutal, black-Irish way. Like most New York bartenders, he was really an actor, or was it the reverse?

  “Divorced?”

  “Separated.”

  He tested his thumb against the pricks of the rose. “Women. They say you got all the freedom. Then you give them their freedom, and they don’t want it.”