The Spectator Bird
Wallace Stegner
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
TWO
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
THREE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
FOUR
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
FIVE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
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THE SPECTATOR BIRD
Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was the author of, among other novels, Remembering Laughter, 1937; The Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943; Joe Hill, 1950; Wolf Willow, 1962; All the Little Live Things, 1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); The Spectator Bird, 1976 (National Book Award, 1977); A Shooting Star, 1961; Angle of Repose, 1971 (Pulitzer Prize, 1972); Recapitulation, 1979; and Crossing to Safety, 1987. His non-fiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, 1954; The Sound of Mountain Water (essays), 1969; The Uneasy Chair. A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, 1974; and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, 1992. Three of his short stories have won O. Henry prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements. His Collected Stories was published in 1990.
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First published in the United States of America by
Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1976
Published in Penguin Books 1990
Copyright © Wallace Stegner, 1976
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Stegner, Wallace Earle, 1909-
The spectator bird/Wallace Stegner.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-04259-5
I. Title. II. Series.
[PS3537.T316S6 1990]
813’.52-dc20
90-7317
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ONE
1
On a February morning, when a weather front is moving in off the Pacific but has not quite arrived, and the winds are changeable and gusty and clouds drive over and an occasional flurry of fine rain darkens the terrace bricks, this place conforms to none of the clichés about California with which they advertise the Sunshine Cities for the Sunset Years. No bland sky, no cool morning overcast, no placid afternoons fading into chilly evenings. This is North Sea weather. The sky boils with cloud, the sun glares out now and then like the opening eye of a doped patient, and the brief beam of intelligence it shoots forth lights on the hills and turns a distant subdivision into a view of Toledo.
Fat towhees sidle up to one another, pinheaded doves forage in the grass, the field next door is suddenly full of robins who arrive like blown leaves, picnic awhile, and depart all together as if summoned. From my study I can watch wrens and bush tits in the live oak outside. The wrens are nesting in a hole for the fifth straight year and are very busy: tilted tails going in, sharp heads with the white eyebrow stripe coming out. They are surly and aggressive, and I wonder idly why I, who seem to be as testy as the wrens, much prefer the sociable bush tits. Maybe because the bush tits are doing what I thought we would be doing out here, just messing around, paying no attention to time or duty, kicking up leaves and playing hide and-seek up and down the oak trunks and generally enjoying themselves.
It is meditation of this kind that keeps me, at nearly seventy, so contented and wholesome.
Ruth, finding me irritable and depressed, has pushed and pestered until she has got me to promise I’ll go to work on the papers again. Eight years ago I took them from the office like a departing bureaucrat trucking off the files, thinking that at the very least there were things in them that would get me a tax deduction if presented to some library. I thought I might even do one of those name-dropping My Life among the Literary books out of them. Ruth still thinks I might. I know better.
The writers I represented have left their monuments, consequential or otherwise. I might have done the same if I had not, at the bottom of the Depression, been forced to choose whether I would be a talent broker or a broke talent. I drifted into my profession as a fly lands on flypaper, and my monument is not in the libraries, or men’s minds, or even in the paper-recycling plants, but in those files. They are the only thing that prove I ever existed. So far as I can see, it is bad enough sitting around watching yourself wear out, without putting your only immortal part prematurely into mothballs. I am not likely even to put the papers into order, though that is the excuse I make to Ruth for not starting to write. A sort of Heisenberg’s Principle applies. Once they are in order, they are dead, and so am I.
So I watch the wrens and bush tits, and paste photographs into albums, and read over old letters, and throw some away and put some back, and compose speeches to Ruth to the effect that it is one thing to examine your life and quite another to write it. Writing your life implies that you think it worth writing. It implies an arrogance, or confidence, or compulsion to justify oneself, that I can’t claim. Did Washington write his memoirs? Did Lincoln, Jefferson, Shakespeare, Socrates? No, but Nixon will, and Agnew is undoubtedly hunched over his right now.
As for Joe Allston, he has been a wisecracking fellow traveler in the lives of other people, and a tourist in his own. There has not been one significant event in his life that he planned. He has gone downstream like a stick, getting hung up in eddies and getting flushed out again, only half understanding what he floated past, and understanding less with every year. He knows nothing that posterity needs to be told about. What he really does in his study is pacify a wife who worries about him and who reads newspaper psychiatrists urging the retired to keep their minds active. Now I finally get around to writing something—not My Life among the Literary, nothing more pretentious than My Days among the Weeks.
Ruth herself, having got me, as she thinks, working, goes forth into the world and agitates herself over environmental deterioration, the paranoias and snobberies of our town council, the programs of the League of Women
Voters, and the deficits of the Co-op. Once a week she goes down to the retirement home (convalescent hospital, death camp) and reads aloud to the shut-ins. A couple of times I have gone there to pick her up and have come out with the horrors. How she stands spending a whole morning among those dim, enfeebled, tottering dead, knowing that she and I are only a few years from being just like them, is beyond my understanding.
“They’re sweet,” she says. “They’re lonely, and friendly, and game, and pathetic, and grateful. They have so little, some of them.” I suppose they are, and do. As if to shame me, one of them even made me, in gratitude to Ruth, a psychedelic typewriter cover, green baize appliquéd with orange and magenta flowers, asserting something sassy into the teeth of time. They have asked me to come down and talk to them about books, but I have not gone. I have no more to say to them than if we were refugees from some war, streaming along a road under air attack, diving for the same ditches when we have to, and getting up to struggle on, each for himself.
What Ruth fears most in me is depression. Well, I wouldn’t welcome it myself. So I will try her prescription (Write something. Write anything. Just put something down) for a week, the way a kid lost in the mountains might holler at a cliff just to hear a voice. I do not expect revelation to ensue, or a search party to emerge cheering from the bushes.
At eleven this morning, as usual, I walked down the hill for the mail. Up on top in the sun it was so warm that I went in shirt sleeves, and at once regretted it, for on the drive cut into the north-facing hill it was as clammy and fishy-smelling as a cold lake shore. The gully below the road muttered with the steep little stream still running from last week’s rain. The steepness aggravated the pains in my big toe joints and knees. I found it hard to believe that no more than a year ago I used to plunge down that drive fast, letting gravity take me.
Halfway down, I stopped to watch a couple of does bedded in fresh grass across the gully. We are much too tamed in these hills for mountain lions, and too subdivided for hunters. Result: an ungulate problem worse than Yellowstone’s. They come in, twenty at a time, to sleep in our shrubbery and eat our pyracantha berries, roses, tomatoes, crabapples, whatever is in season. I have old socks full of blood meal hanging from trees and shrubs I value, because deer are supposed to be offended by the smell. I have even contemplated getting a shipment of lion dung from that place in Los Angeles that sells it, and have only been deterred, or deturded, by the reflection that lion dung would probably offend me as much as it would offend an ungulate.
These two lay tame as cows under a big oak, their jaws rolling and stopping and rolling again as they watched me, their club ears forward, their tails twitching. Morning, neighbors. And stay the hell out of my garden if you don’t want your hides full of bird shot.
At the bottom of the hill I came out of the tunnel of trees where the culvert leads the runoff under the road and between two big eucalyptus trees. At one stride I passed from chill to warmth. The sun flowed over me, the grass brightened, the goose pimples smoothed out on my arms, my low spirits briefly rose. California February, as new and green and sodden as a fern basket dipped in a pond. Hoc erat in votis, Horace said. This used to be among my prayers: a bit of land not too large, which would contain a garden and near the house an ever-flowing spring, and beyond that a wood lot.
Exactly. What we came for, what we have. I should be as placid in my mind as those two deer ruminating my shrubbery up on the hill. For a while I was, at times I still am. At the moment, in the generative sun, I felt practically no pain. O brave new world, that hath such Februaries in it.
Or Febuaries, as Cronkite and half his tribe would say.
I walked on past the Hammond cottage, which I will never get over thinking of as the Catlin place, though Marian died and John and Debby moved away four years ago. People we loved; there are too few of them. The very sight of their house darkened the day again for me.
Nobody home, as usual. Mrs. Hammond sells real estate, the girls are in school, and old Hammond is off in Baluchistan or somewhere training gendarmerie for the Iraqi government, exporting American know-how to help put down the Kurds—the valiant Kurds, as I remember them from “Sohrab and Rustum,” the Kurds who are demandeen self-government, as I hear from Cronkite.
Damnation. Instantly irritable, I compose a letter to the press instructing news commentators that those who use the language publicly and professionally should be advised that there are two r’s in February, that ing is not pronounced een, and that verbs enjoy other possibilities than the present participle. The White House announceen today that it has called a meeteen of business leaders for early Febuary. Just saying it to myself, like the old pantaloon I am getting to be, brought my blood pressure up to about 250/200, and when I found that the mailbox was empty, that the postman was late again, I announced a loud God damn to the startled creekside and sat down to wait on a pile of timbers that was once a bridge until I replaced it with a culvert. My internal grumblings went on, the way a high-compression engine running on low-octane gas will go on galloping and coughing and smoking after the ignition is shut off.
It’s a bad sign, I know it. Ruth tells me at least once a day that old people, or people getting old, tend to disengage, back away, turn inward, listen only to themselves, and get self-righteous and censorious. And they mustn’t. (I mustn’t.) She hates to drive anywhere with me because I am inclined to cuss out drivers who don’t please me. What good does it do? she cries. They can’t hear you. All you do is upset me. It lets off steam, failing which I might explode, I tell her. What are you doing now but exploding? she asks.
Right, absolutely right. Faultfinding doesn’t let off pressure, it only builds it up. It is only one of many processes, none of which I like and most of which I can’t seem to help: the decreasing ability to stand heat or cold, something to do with the expansion and contraction of the capillaries. The slowing down of the mitotic rate in body cells, with resultant deterioration and lessening of function. The accumulation of plaque in the artery walls and of calcium spurs in the joints and of uric acid, sugar, and other undesirable chemicals in the blood and urine. Inescapable, irreversible, hateful.
Like last week, when the dentist told me that the molar he has been trying to save by root canal work will have to go. I can read the future in that direction without cards or tea leaves. First a bridge, if he can find anything to hitch it to. Then a partial plate. Finally a complete cleaning out of old snags in preparation for false teeth, on television called dentures. There will be a morning when I look in the minor and see an old sunken-cheeked stranger with scared eyes and a mouth like a sea urchin’s.
I can stand it, and I really ought to try not to let it and other things make me crabby. But I damn well don’t look forward to it, and I don’t like any of the signs that the cookie has already started to crumble. The other day at the museum the young thing at the gate took one look at me and said brightly, “Senior citizen, sir?” and passed me out half-price tickets. That shook even Ruth. The way I felt, half price was an overcharge.
I had been sitting on the old timbers for about ten minutes when Ben Alexander drove in from the county road in his convertible. His top was down, his hair was tangled, and he had Edith Patterson in the seat beside him, looking like a raccoon in her wraparound Hollywood shades. It was all so young and gay and California that I had to laugh. Ben is the very chief of the tribe that makes old age out to be a time of liberation. He is writing a book about it.
He stopped beside me and ran down the window and sat looking at me with his hands on the wheel. Until he finally retired a couple of years ago he used to be my doctor, and he can still make me feel as if I am sitting there on the table, ridiculous in my shorts, waiting for the rubber hammer under the kneecaps and the steel handle against the soles of the feet, and the finger up under the scrotum (cough), and the rubber glove up the ass trespassing on my most secret prostate. (How’s the urine? Good stream? Have to get up in the night?) He is a man I admire and trust, on
e of the godlike ones who direct lives, their own and others’. Maybe that is what keeps me from ever quite relaxing around him, for I am one of those to whom life happens. Maybe I disbelieve his pollyanna doctrines about old age. Or maybe it is only the doctor-patient relationship that makes me slightly uneasy. It is hard to be relaxed around a man who at any moment might examine your prostate.
His gray medical eyes were noting the condition of my eyeballs, my paunch, the stiffness with which I stood up, for all I know the spots on my lungs and liver. “Resting, roosting, or nesting?” he said. Edith, with her curved, reflecting blackout windows turned toward me, made a little smile.
“Brooding,” I said, and rose and dusted off my pants. “Molting. Hello, Edith. Don’t you know a girl can be compromised, running around in a convertible with this old rooster?”
Which was plausible enough to be not so plainly spoken. Ben being Ben, you always wonder when you see a woman with him. His wife, who was wonderful and whom he adored, died several years ago. Ben is seventy-nine, he has sons over fifty and grandsons who have voted in the last two presidential elections, he wears a hearing aid when he wants to hear from the right side, a pacemaker is implanted under the skin of his chest, and his left hip joint is aluminum, newly installed. Nevertheless, with vitality like his, you never know.
As for Edith, she is always a little cool and aloof and amused. Not unattractive—she is as attractive a sixty-year-old as you ever saw. Her air of faintly mocking imperturbability has a remembrance of Dietrich sultriness about it, and though I never saw anything even slightly askew between her and Tom Patterson, an architect whose name is as well known in Karachi and Tel Aviv as in his home town, and who has had two operations for cancer of the tongue, that didn’t prove anything either. One of the few wise sayings I am sometimes tempted to pass on to breathless posterity is that anything is possible at any time.
