Light While There Is Light. Keith Waldrop
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in William Allen White ” A dramatic pause, whether of outrage or admiration I could never decide. It was certainly portentous, our most celebrated citizen hanging in the balance. “And they turned him down!” My father had gone on up, into the Scottish Rite and the Shrine.
In the era of the Civil War, the Methodists, already old and formal, charged rental on their pews. The seceding branch, preaching largely to outcasts and the needy, decided to abolish this charge and so denominated themselves Free. It was a common practice among congregations of that time, especially near the frontier, to hire musicians for Sunday services—which meant, more often than not, bringing players from the local theater into the house of God. The Free Methodists, with all-or-nothing zeal, abolished instruments from their church, and in the early nineteen forties, when I attended and after much hesitation joined them, the singing was entirely congregational—no choir—and regulated by, at most, a pitch pipe. Sister Eliot or Sister Faulkner would lead (the one somewhat faster, the other somewhat slower, than expected tempo), not moving their hands, but simply by facing the congregation and singing out.
So when Sunday morning came around, or Sunday night, or Wednesday night, my mother would cease from her moanings, comb her hair, put on her best, and she and Elaine and I would hasten to South and Commercial for some a cappella praise, some middling preaching and, with luck, a breath of ecstasy. As long as she was there, among the saints, her life seemed clear and meaningful. Outside, in the world, she was a complex of miseries that I am still not sure I can quite sort out. “My heart,” she would say, fingers to her throat, but it stood for a whole existence.
Her greatest pride was the smallness of her hands and feet. If one of us bought her bedroom slippers for her birthday—demanding at the store their very most smallest size—they were sure to be too large and she was sure to be enraged that we should think her feet so gross. On less emotional occasions, “I have Cinderella feet,” she would say, and it was terribly plain that, not only the prince, but the entire fairy-tale realm, had passed her by, leaving the most workaday ashes.
Her first husband had been a deception. Her second she treated frankly as an enemy. It only gradually dawned on me, between battles, that I was disputed territory. Every time I went to church, it was a victory for her, and I came to regard my father as an alien power, sinister in behavior, but possessed of strange forces. His occupation itself was mysterious: as a railroader, he was fanatically punctual, continually checking his watch and angry if it got more than a few seconds from the official Santa Fe clock. But since he worked on freight trains, he was liable to appear at any hour of the night or day and just as arbitrarily to be called away. The unknown figure of the caller—just a voice on the telephone—made its way into my private mythology. Simply to answer the anonymous ring put one within the possibility of hearing, instead of an Hello that would connect with a remembered face, the disorienting but imperative “This is the caller.”
Between the living room, which for some reason or other was my bedroom for a time, and the room where my parents slept, there were huge sliding doors. (This was a house on Neosho Street, the most nearly permanent of our homes—but there was inevitably, wherever we were, a sense of provisional arrangements, of waiting for better weather, a new government.) One night when my father was in, not likely to be called, I settled down on my convertible but could not enjoy my insomnia because of the argument from the other side of the door. An argument meant that my father’s voice continued on and on into the night, occasionally raised to a shout or broken by a murmur from my mother, who for the most part maintained a dead silence. All their nights together spread out like this into an agonizing deadlock. I don’t know what they argued about, or if indeed there was a subject. To escape from the oppressive sound, I set myself to wait for the unattainable moment of entering sleep. To be conscious for once at that magical transition seemed to me—I don’t know why—a knowledge I would need, that I could not well do without.
But just when I had dozed off, slipping past the threshold I wanted so much to examine, I was jolted awake by doors slid open, then slid shut again. And then, in the dark, my father lay down beside me, breathing heavily. I made no sign of life and gradually he subsided into, I thought, a sleep of his own. But apparently he was listening, there in the dark beside me, for before I quite had a chance to miss again my moment of going to sleep, he had thrown off the cover and the great doors rolled back with a crash and he was swearing loudly. After he left his bed, Elaine had slipped in beside my mother. Now she raced back to her own room as he switched the lights on. “This is what happens,” he was yelling, “as soon as I turn my back.” The giant doors cracked shut again, leaving me dazzled with the light that was now shut out. His shouts continued on the other side, Elaine’s voice sometimes chiming in from a distance. (Neither Charles nor Julian were there—Charles was in the war in the South Pacific.) I lay tense while the shouts got louder. I heard Sister Eliot’s name. Finally there were other sounds: movements, doors. Then a blow and my mother’s scream and Elaine howling.
I began to pray. I began, with an earnestness I have rarely recaptured in any action since then, to pray to God that he would strike my father dead. My prayer was answered, some dozen years later, after both my hatred and my faith had died long lingering deaths. The only immediate aftermath of that night was a peace-offering from my father, a new secondhand piano, at which my mother sat, eyes closed, playing what she could remember of something by Chopin, a syncopated waltz from 1920, brilliant variations on “Pass Me Not.”
II
Once or twice I rode with my father on his waycar at the end of a mile-long freight. From the cupola one could see along the tops of a hundred cars to the stack of a 2900. It seemed to me a tedious trip, much of the time spent on sidings, waiting for the dinkiest passenger trains to zip by. Night came and my father lit the kerosene lamp over his jolting desk where he went through the paperwork for the hundred carloads. The lamp gave a brilliant white light from its ash mantle, but I dropped off before we made it into Newton and was only half awake to clamber across the immense freight yard where, strangely, there were blinding lights all through the air, and yet the crisscrossed rails seemed endless and unlit.
On one such trip—when I was not along—the waycar, caught suddenly in the collected slack of a hundred couplings, cracked whip-like and threw my father on the floor, where he found he could not rise again. His back was broken.
“It was those months in the hospital,” he always said later, even much later, “while I was helpless in a cast, while I was out of the way. That’s when they really got control of your mother, those holy bitches.” He was in the Santa Fe’s hospital in Topeka, where I visited once a week. I am not sure, but possibly it was then I joined the church, a ceremony that my mother took as a triumph in the war against Satan and Arthur. At any rate the house was quieter. Then, finally, he came back, and gradually everything was as before, but a little worse, as things usually get worse.
My mother’s health was a constant problem. She had had some of the best doctors: she went to Dr. Curran in Kansas City for her tinted glasses. A goiter that had developed about the time I was born was cut out by no less than Dr. Hertzler, the famous “Horse-and-Buggy-Doctor” of Halstead. He became, understandably, one of her heroes. In his hands, she felt safe. “He’s so good,” she said, not alone I gather from her own experience but from a composite legend, “he could just cut that old goiter out and then” (her tiny hand in gesture of magic) “just tie it all up with one hand.”
I might not have remembered that, except that some years later, when she went to Halstead for a checkup of some kind, I went with her and sat in the waiting room of the clinic and stared at the Mennonites in their bonnets and beards. And old Dr. Hertzler himself, who saw no patients anymore but wandered vaguely around the maze he had built, appeared with a fixed and benign smile. He had forgotten to put a shirt on, so his flannel underwear showed above baggy trousers. Stopping in front of me, he looked down from a great height and out of some pocket came the most enormous hand I had ever seen. He was a big man, but his hand was the hand of a giant, and in it was a yellow jawbreaker that he placed precisely in my palm. Then he wandered on to the next child. The nurses tolerated him.
My mother’s favorite hymn, which she looked at long enough to memorize, at the price of a terrible migraine, was “Where the Healing Waters Flow.” She played it over and over. More