to me, Pieface; my mother enjoyed the malice of it, and the nickname was apt, as it would be for Edna’s daughter. Broad, flat faces, a touch doughy. As she and I grew older, our physical tussels ceased, as best as I could remember; and if my pubescent thoughts had sometimes turned to her, a thin partition away on those hot “corn-growing” nights in Chagrin Falls, thoughts are not deeds, not on this mortal plane. How odd of Edna to say that, or of Verna to say she did.
Two limber black youths were mounting the steel stairs three at a time, in utterly silent bounds. They rose toward meat great speed, in their worn stovepipe jeans, their shiny basketball jackets and huge silent jogging shoes, and passed on either side of me like headlights that turn out to be motorcycles. My heart skipped and I nodded tersely, a second too late. In my tweed jacket and boyish gray haircut, I was the suspicious character here.
Along Prospect Street, the shadows of the half-abandoned houses extended from curb to curb, although in the sky overhead racing white clouds and negative patches of stark blue still spoke of bright day. At the rear of a vacant lot stood a marvel I had not noticed when walking this way thirty minutes ago: a shapely tall ginkgo tree, each of its shuddering fanshaped leaves turned, with a uniformity unlike the ragged turning of the less primordial deciduous trees, a plangent yellow monotone. The tree seemed a towering outcry there in this derelict block, in a passing slash of sun. Along with a flicker of idle knowledge concerning the ginkgo—it had existed before the dinosaurs; in ancient China it had been grown around temples as a sacred tree; like the human species, it was dioecious, that is, divided into male and female; the female seed pods stink—came this stranger, certain knowledge that Dale, after his visit to Verna after seeing me a week ago, had also noticed this particular tree, and been struck by it, as by the green puddle, the black turd. His religious reaction passed into me. Peace descended, that wordless gratification which seems to partake of the fundamental cosmic condition. I even stopped, on the pavement of this unsavory neighborhood, to ponder more deeply that tall ginkgo with its gonglike golden color; there are so few things which, contemplated, do not like flimsy trapdoors open under the weight of our attention into the bottomless pit below.
II
i
T he next time Dale came to see me in my office, sidling in with that embarrassed effrontery of his, his red knuckles and his acne the only imperfections in his generally waxen pallor, I felt fonder of him. Verna’s assurance that he was not her lover had something to do with my kindly disposition: these young people come at you with their drawn sword of youth and it turns out to be a rubber prop, a nerf sword. They are no better at extracting happiness from their animal health than we were. He was still wearing his navy-blue watch cap but, as the weather got colder, no longer a camouflage jacket—instead, a denim jacket with a sheepskin lining, its yellow-white tufts making a scruffy halo around its edges. A cowboy look, though he lacked the Marlboro.
“I filled out my forms and turned them in and thought you might like to have a Xerox.”
“I would.” My eye dropped past his statistics to his description of his project. To demonstrate from existing physical and biological data, through the use of models and manipulations on the electronic digital computer, the existence of God, i.e., of a purposive and determining intelligence behind all phenomena . “Biological?” I merely asked.
Dale slumped into the chair of many woods facing my desk and told me, “I’ve been looking a little into evolution and Darwinism and all that; I hadn’t much thought about any of it since high school. You know, they show you these charts with the blue-green algae on the bottom and primates branching off from the tree shrew and you assume it’s just as much
Two limber black youths were mounting the steel stairs three at a time, in utterly silent bounds. They rose toward meat great speed, in their worn stovepipe jeans, their shiny basketball jackets and huge silent jogging shoes, and passed on either side of me like headlights that turn out to be motorcycles. My heart skipped and I nodded tersely, a second too late. In my tweed jacket and boyish gray haircut, I was the suspicious character here.
Along Prospect Street, the shadows of the half-abandoned houses extended from curb to curb, although in the sky overhead racing white clouds and negative patches of stark blue still spoke of bright day. At the rear of a vacant lot stood a marvel I had not noticed when walking this way thirty minutes ago: a shapely tall ginkgo tree, each of its shuddering fanshaped leaves turned, with a uniformity unlike the ragged turning of the less primordial deciduous trees, a plangent yellow monotone. The tree seemed a towering outcry there in this derelict block, in a passing slash of sun. Along with a flicker of idle knowledge concerning the ginkgo—it had existed before the dinosaurs; in ancient China it had been grown around temples as a sacred tree; like the human species, it was dioecious, that is, divided into male and female; the female seed pods stink—came this stranger, certain knowledge that Dale, after his visit to Verna after seeing me a week ago, had also noticed this particular tree, and been struck by it, as by the green puddle, the black turd. His religious reaction passed into me. Peace descended, that wordless gratification which seems to partake of the fundamental cosmic condition. I even stopped, on the pavement of this unsavory neighborhood, to ponder more deeply that tall ginkgo with its gonglike golden color; there are so few things which, contemplated, do not like flimsy trapdoors open under the weight of our attention into the bottomless pit below.
II
i
T he next time Dale came to see me in my office, sidling in with that embarrassed effrontery of his, his red knuckles and his acne the only imperfections in his generally waxen pallor, I felt fonder of him. Verna’s assurance that he was not her lover had something to do with my kindly disposition: these young people come at you with their drawn sword of youth and it turns out to be a rubber prop, a nerf sword. They are no better at extracting happiness from their animal health than we were. He was still wearing his navy-blue watch cap but, as the weather got colder, no longer a camouflage jacket—instead, a denim jacket with a sheepskin lining, its yellow-white tufts making a scruffy halo around its edges. A cowboy look, though he lacked the Marlboro.
“I filled out my forms and turned them in and thought you might like to have a Xerox.”
“I would.” My eye dropped past his statistics to his description of his project. To demonstrate from existing physical and biological data, through the use of models and manipulations on the electronic digital computer, the existence of God, i.e., of a purposive and determining intelligence behind all phenomena . “Biological?” I merely asked.
Dale slumped into the chair of many woods facing my desk and told me, “I’ve been looking a little into evolution and Darwinism and all that; I hadn’t much thought about any of it since high school. You know, they show you these charts with the blue-green algae on the bottom and primates branching off from the tree shrew and you assume it’s just as much
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