The Promise of Rest Read online

  THE PROMISE OF REST

  BOOKS BY

  REYNOLDS PRICE

  THREE GOSPELS 1996

  THE PROMISE OF REST 1995

  A WHOLE NEW LIFE 1994

  THE COLLECTED STORIES 1993

  FULL MOON 1993

  BLUE CALHOUN 1992

  THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE 1991

  NEW MUSIC 1990

  THE USE OF FIRE 1990

  THE TONGUES OF ANGELS 1990

  CLEAR PICTURES 1989

  GOOD HEARTS 1988

  A COMMON ROOM 1987

  THE LAWS OF ICE 1986

  KATE VAIDEN 1986

  PRIVATE CONTENTMENT 1984

  MUSTIAN 1983

  VITAL PROVISIONS 1982

  THE SOURCE OF LIGHT 1981

  A PALPABLE GOD 1978

  EARLY DARK 1977

  THE SURFACE OF EARTH 1975

  THINGS THEMSELVES 1972

  PERMANENT ERRORS 1970

  LOVE AND WORK 1968

  A GENEROUS MAN 1966

  THE NAMES AND FACES OF HEROES 1963

  A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE 1962

  REYNOLDS PRICE

  THE

  PROMISE

  OF

  REST

  SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION

  PUBLISHED BY SIMON & SCHUSTER

  SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION

  Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,

  living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1995 by Reynolds Price

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  First Scribner Paperback Fiction edition 1996

  Excerpt from “Little Gidding” in Four Quartets, copyright 1943

  by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot,

  reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.

  Excerpt from “One Art” from The Collected Poems 1927-1979

  by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel.

  Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

  SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION and design are trademarks of

  Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc. under license by

  Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  The Library of Congress had cataloged the Scribner edition as follows:

  Price, Reynolds, 1933-

  The promise of rest / Reynolds Price.

  p. cm. -(A Great circle)

  “This book concludes the trilogy by R. Price which began with The surface of Earth

  (1975), and continued with The source of light (1982) -CIP info.

  I. Title.

  II. Series: Price, Reynolds, 1933- Great Circle.

  PS3566.R54P76 1995

  813′.54—dc20 94-48086

  CIP

  ISBN 0-684-80149-3

  0-684-82510-4 (Pbk)

  ISBN: 978-0-6848-2510-6

  eISBN: 978-1-451-60311-8

  FOR

  MICHAEL HOWARD RAYMOND JORDAN

  FOR

  FORTY YEARS

  BOOK ONE BOUND HOME

  April 1993

  BOOK TWO HOME

  April-July 1993

  BOOK THREE BOUND AWAY

  July-August 1993

  We die with the dying:

  See, they depart, and we go with them.

  We are born with the dead:

  See, they return, and bring us with them.

  T. S. ELIOT, “Little Gidding”

  ONE

  BOUND HOME

  APRIL 1993

  For thirty-odd years, this white narrow room at the top of a granite building in the midst of Duke University had been one place where Hutchins Mayfield never felt less than alive and useful by the day and the hour. For that long stretch he’d met his seminar students here, and this year’s group was gathered for its first meeting of the week. There were fourteen of them, eight men and six women, aged nineteen to twenty-two; and by a pleasant accident, each had a winning face, though two of the men were still in the grip of post-adolescent narcolepsy-frequent short fade-outs.

  This noon they all sat, with Hutch at the head, round a long oak table by a wall of windows that opened on dogwoods in early spring riot; and though today was the class’s last hour for dealing with Milton’s early poems before moving on to Marvell and Herbert, even more students were dazed by the rising heat and the fragrance borne through every window.

  In the hope of rousing them for a last twenty minutes, Hutch raised his voice slightly and asked who knew the Latin root of the word sincere.

  A dozen dead sets of eyes shied from him.

  He gave his routine fixed class grin, which meant I can wait you out till Doom.

  Then the most skittish student of all raised her pale hand and fixed her eyes on Hutch—immense and perfectly focused eyes, bluer than glacial lakes. When Hutch had urged her, months ago, to talk more in class, she’d told him that every time she spoke she was racked by dreams the following night. And still, volunteering, she was ready to bolt at the first sign of pressure from Hutch or the class.

  Hutch flinched in the grip of her eyes but called her name. “Karen?”

  She said “Without wax, from the Latin sine cere.”

  “Right and what does that mean?”

  She hadn’t quite mustered the breath and daring for a full explanation; but with one long breath, she managed to say “When a careless Roman sculptor botched his marble, he’d fill the blunder with smooth white wax. A sincere statue was one without wax.” Once that was out, Karen blushed a dangerous color of red; and her right hand came up to cover her mouth.

  Hutch recalled that Karen was the only member of the class who’d studied Latin, three years in high school—an all but vanished yet near-vital skill. He thanked her, then said “The thoroughly dumb but central question that’s troubled critics of Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ was stated most famously by pompous Dr. Samuel Johnson late in the eighteenth century. He of course objected mightily, if pointlessly, to the shepherd trappings of a pastoral poem—what would he say about cowboy films today? He even claimed—and I think I can very nearly quote him—that ‘He who thus grieves will excite no sympathy; he who thus praises will confer no honor.’ I think he’s as wrong as a critic can be, which is saying a lot; and I think I can prove it.”

  Hutch paused to see if their faces could bear what he had in mind; and since the hour was nearly over, most of their eyes had opened wider and were at least faking consciousness again. So he said “I’d like to read the whole poem aloud—again, not because I love my own voice but because any poem is as dead on the page as the notes of a song unless you hear its music performed by a reasonably practiced competent musician. It’ll take ten minutes; please wake up and listen.” He grinned again.

  The narcolepts shook themselves like drowned Labradors. They were oddly both redheads.

  One woman with record-long bangs clamped her eyes shut.

  Hutch said “Remember now—the most skillful technician in English poetry who lived after Milton was Tennyson, two centuries later. Tennyson was no pushover when it came to praising other poets—very few poets are—but he claimed more than once that ‘Lycidas’ is the highest touchstone of poetic appreciation in the English lan
guage: a touchstone being a device for gauging the gold content of metal. Presumably Tennyson meant that any other English poem, rubbed against ‘Lycidas,’ will show its gold or base alloy.”

  Though Hutch had long since memorized the poem, all 193 lines, he looked to his book and started with Milton’s prefatory note.

  “In this monody the author bewails a learned friend unfortunately drowned in his passage from Chester on the Irish seas, 1637.”

  Then he braced himself for the steeplechase run-through that had never failed to move him deeply.

  “Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more

  Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,

  I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,

  And with forced fingers rude,

  Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.”

  From there on, along the crowded unpredictable way to its visionary end—with Lycidas rescued and welcomed in Heaven by a glee club of saints and Christ himself, giving nectar shampoos—Hutch stressed what always felt to him like the heart of the poem, its authentic cry. It sounded most clearly in the lines where Milton either feigned or—surely—poured out genuine grief for the loss of his college friend, Edward King, drowned in a shipwreck at age twenty-five, converted in the poem to an ancient shepherd named Lycidas and longed for in this piercing extravagant cry with its keening vowels.

  “Thee shepherd, thee the woods, and desert caves,

  With wild thyme and the gadding vine o’ergrown,

  And all their echoes mourn.

  The willows, and the hazel copses green,

  Shall now no more be seen,

  Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.

  As killing as the canker to the rose,

  Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze,

  Or frost to flowers, that their gay wardrobe wear,

  When first the white thorn blows;

  Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd’s ear.”

  Ten minutes later at the poem’s hushed end—“Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new”—Hutch was even more shaken than he’d meant to be. Strangely he hadn’t quite foreseen a public collusion between Milton’s subject and his own ongoing family tragedy. But at least he hadn’t wept; so he sat for five seconds, looking out the window past the creamy white and cruciform blossoms toward the huge water oaks with their new leaves.

  Then he faced the class again and repeated from memory the central lines—“Thee shepherd, thee the woods, and desert caves… .” When he thought they’d sunk as deep as they could into these young television-devastated brains, he said “Estimate the wax content of those few lines.”

  Even Karen looked flummoxed again and turned aside.

  Hutch tried another way. “—The sincerity quotient. Does Milton truly miss the sight of young Edward King, King’s actual presence before the poet’s eyes; if not, what’s he doing in so many carefully laid-down words?” When they all stayed blank as whitewashed walls, Hutch laughed. “Anybody, for ten extra points. Take a flying risk for once in your life.” (Through the years, except for the glorious and troubling late 1960s, most of his students had proved far more conservative than corporate lawyers.)

  Finally Kim said “He’s showing off”—the class beauty queen, lacquered and painted and grade-obsessed.

  Whitney said “Milton’s almost thirty years old, right? Then I figure he’s stretching—he’s using King’s death as a chinning bar to test his own strengths. Can I write this thing? he seems to be saying, right through to the end.” Since Whit was one of the midday nappers, his contributions were always surprising in their sane precision.

  Still fire-truck red, Karen finally said “I think Milton’s discovering, as the ink leaves his pen, how terribly his friend drowned and vanished—they never even found the friend’s corpse apparently. I think it sounds like Milton truly longs for him back.”

  Hutch said “Does it sound like longing, or does he really long?”

  Karen winced and withdrew.

  Whitney said “What’s the difference? Nobody can gauge that, now anyway.”

  Hutch said “Why not?”

  “It’s too far behind us, nearly four hundred years. The words have all changed; we can’t hear their meaning.” Whit lowered his near-white lashes like scrims down over green eyes.

  Alisoun said “Then let’s all go home.” She was six foot one, and any threat to unfold her long bones to their full height was always welcome.

  Hutch asked her to explain.

  “If four hundred years in the life of a language as widespread as English add up to nothing but failed communication, then I don’t see any point in encouraging the human race to live another year. Let’s just quit and vacate.” She was genuinely at the point of anger.

  The other women looked officially startled; their mothering genes had felt the assault.

  Erik turned his face, that was always stern, a notch or two sterner and set it on Alisoun. “Get serious. I anyhow understand every syllable—not one of them’s moved an inch in three centuries—and I’m no genius of a reader, as you well know. Milton is literally desolate here, right here on this page, all this time later. The fact that he’s also phenomenal at words and rhyme and music doesn’t disqualify him for sincere grief. If that’s been the problem about the poem since old Dr. Johnson, then it looks like critics are short on reasons to fan their gums.”

  Hutch said “Touché. They mostly are.”

  But to general surprise, Karen recovered gall enough to say “I have to disagree. Milton’s mainly bragging, the way Kim said. The poem’s primarily about himself—‘Watch my lovely dust. Recommend me to God. Buy all my books.’”

  Hutch smiled but raised a monitory finger. “Milton didn’t publish a book of poems for eight whole years after ‘Lycidas.’”

  So tremulous Karen took another long breath, faced Hutch unblinking and thrust toward the subject that no other student had found imaginable. “Mr. Mayfield, have you written poems about your son?”

  Startling as it was to have the question come from Karen, Hutch realized he’d waited months for someone to ask it. Now the demon’s out and smashing round the room. In Karen’s halting, plainly sympathetic voice, the question sounded answerable at least. Her boldness surely had to mean that the news of his son was widespread now and accepted as mentionable. Yet when Hutch looked round to all the faces—some class was breaking up early outside; the hall was a din through the shut glass door—all but Karen were blank as slate again. So Hutch offered the minimum he thought they could use. “My grown son is sick with AIDS in New York. Till today no known AIDS patient has won. And no, Karen, I haven’t written a word, on that subject anyhow. I doubt I ever can.”

  Karen had the grace not to push on and make a connection with Milton, though she thought Anybody in genuine grief couldn’t sit and write an intricate poem, not one we’d keep on reading for centuries.

  But Hutch could read the drift in her eyes. “Don’t for an instant make the tempting mistake of thinking that I share Milton’s powers—nobody else in European poetry, not since Homer anyhow, can make that claim.”

  Kim said “Not Virgil, Dante or Shakespeare?”

  Hutch shook his head No and suddenly felt a surge of pleasure—a strange boiling from deep in his chest of pleased excitement to plant his feet down and crown John Milton supreme in all the great questions of life. He said “Milton knows more than anyone else, in the western hemisphere in any case, in verse anyhow; and he’s nine-tenths right on almost every question. Shakespeare is all a zillion bright guesses, bright or pitchdark—not one single answer. Dante knows just one big urgent thing.”

  Whitney said “Which is?”

  Hutch said “‘No rest but in your will’—the your means God of course.”

  Kim scowled, the regulation atheist.

  And Karen’s eyes plainly showed that she felt Hutch had short-changed the subject she raised—his son’s present illness.

  So he faced her d
irectly and tried to give more. “Even Milton will have found that not every loss, however picturesque, and not every joy, however rhythmic, will submit itself as poetry fodder—as food for new poems.”

  Karen accepted that but wanted still more. “Can you think of a sadness or a genuine pleasure that wouldn’t submit when you yourself tried to write it out?”

  Hutch knew at once. “In fact, I can—oh many times over. But one in particular strikes me today. I’ll be dealing with it again—in my life, not my work—in another few hours. Soon as I leave you today, I’ll be driving up to my family’s homeplace in the rolling country north of here, up near Virginia, for what should be a mildly pleasant occasion. We’ll be celebrating the 101st birthday of a cousin of mine, named Grainger Walters. I’ve known the event was coming for a long time and have tried more than once to write a poem that would say what that man’s meant to me since the day I was born—a kind of older brother when my mother died, a surrogate father when my father died young, even a species of bighearted alien from some kind of Paradise, guarding and guiding me fairly successfully for six long decades. But a poem won’t come, or hasn’t come yet.”

  Whitney said “Do you understand why?”

  “Not fully, no I don’t. But I’m fairly sure the problem’s buried somewhere in the fact that I’m all white—pure Anglo-Saxon and Celtic genes, to the best of my knowledge—and Grainger Walters is part black, the grandson of one of my Aryan great-grandfathers on up in Virginia, in Reconstruction days.”

  Whitney suddenly strummed an imaginary banjo and sang to the tune of “Way Down Upon the Swanee River,

  “Hankey-pankey on the old plantation,

  Far, far away.”

  Alisoun said “It’s already been written.”

  Hutch was puzzled.

  “By Mary Chestnut in her famous diary; by Faulkner, in every paragraph—by Robert Penn Warren too, a whole slew more. Won’t that be the main reason you’re stymied? The job’s been done.”

  Since Hutch was a poet, not a novelist, the fact had never quite dawned that harshly. He instantly suspected She’s at least a third right. But he said “Wouldn’t the fact that every one of you is white, that a black student at this university—or any other—very seldom takes courses in literature, mean that you’re wrong? Far from being done to death, the subject of race in America—race in its deepest historical and moment-by-moment contemporary ramifications—has barely reached the level of audibility in our literature, much less the level of sane portrayal. A world of explaining remains to be done.”