Telling Tales by John Wheatcroft
As for the I in the story of my life—well, now, that’s a different story, isn’t it. The less said about him here, the better. The only thing about him that matters is that he’s writing this story.
As for Ernest Hemingway in the story of his life, I think it more than likely that he wrote the story called “The Killers” in the hope of keeping Al and Max in the story and out of his life. He wanted to prevent them from discovering where sometime, like Ole Andreson, he’d be holing up. He hoped to make it impossible for them to track him down and meet him. Don’t most writers write their stories for some such reason?
Unfortunately Ernest Hemingway, while he wrote one hell of a story for us to read, was not successful in warding off Al and Max. After years of searching, Al and Max, who, whatever else they may or may not be, are relentless, caught up with Ernest Hemingway in Ketchum, Sun Valley, Idaho. No doubt they had it in for Ernest Hemingway for disappearing them from his story “The Killers” before they were able to meet Ole Andreson, whom they’d been sent to meet in the town of Summit, where, as would Ernest Hemingway in Ketchum, he was holing up. Al and Max’s meeting with Ernest Hemingway in the story of his life was for real.
There are some ironies here. Whenever Ernest Hemingway is involved, you can bet your bottom dollar or your life, depending on your “values,” as they call them these days, that ironies are lurking somewhere close by. For one thing, it’s ironic that the name of the place where Ernest Hemingway in the story of his life is caught up with by Al and Max is Ketchum, Sun Valley. Ketchum, if your ear hasn’t already told you, is a slurred phonetic spelling of “catch him.” Then, too, to have things end in a valley is quite different from having them end on a summit. And I’m afraid that when Al and Max showed up they hardly brought sunshine. While appropriate, these ironies may be taken as happenstance. I wonder.
A more significant irony is one that’s willed. As a character named Will, of all possible names, would do if he could but can’t because I disappear him too soon from the story I in the story of my life am trying to get written, Ernest Hemingway in the story of his life did finesse Al and Max. Realizing that somehow they had managed to get out of his story “The Killers” and to catch up with him in Sun Valley, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway in the story of his life made up his mind not to end that story like Ole Andreson, who to this day is lying in bed with his clothes on, facing a wall in an upstairs room at the back end of a corridor in a rooming house in the town of Summit, waiting to be met by Al and Max. Just as he knew when he’d reached the place and arrived at the time to stop writing his story “The Killers,” Ernest Hemingway knew when he’d come to the place and the time to stop writing the story of his life.
I in the story of my life am still writing away at the story called “B/Will/iam/ie and Al and Max and You and I.” Whenever I choose to, I can stop. And I’m sorely tempted to end the whole sorry mess here and now. But I won’t. Because the story isn’t finished. Ending something and finishing something are not the same. Willie, Billie, Bill, William, Will, and Al and Max and I in the story have been taken care. That leaves you, doesn’t it.
Even though I in the story of my life, being of an old-fashioned, well-brought up ilk, for the sake of politeness placed you ahead of the I in the title “B/Will/iam/ie and Al and Max and You and I,” I’ve saved you for last. Along the same line, you might have noticed that, while all the letters designating the “ill”—another ironic pun, I’m afraid—characters reside in that first alphabet-soup word of the title, the characters themselves don’t appear in the same order in which their names can be extracted from that scramble of letters.
Well, that gives you something to do and is reason enough for you to be in my story—you can fish those letters out and properly arrange them. While you’re at it, you might even be able to rearrange the letters into a less klutzy, more subtle and devious title. And there’s still more for you to do. You can neaten other things up and you can find words that come closer to being right than are the words I’ve settled for.
Your potential for improving things is not all that’s concerned with you. In addition to being a character in my story, you too are a character in the story of your life. Most probably, like the two I’s and the two Hemingways, the two you’s are almost but not quite the same. All that I know about you in the story of your life is that at this instant you are reading a story about the you who is a character in a story some I is writing. Frankly that’s enough.
You, on the other hand, must wonder about you. I mean the you in the story of your life must wonder about the you in my story. For example, you must wonder why since I’ve given you equal billing with Willie, Billie, Bill, William, Al and Max and I in the title, yet you aren’t in the story more. Also why you aren’t more in the story. Those two are different wonders. Both are expressed in the same words, but the words are not in the same order, which changes their meaning. By now you’ve caught on to this sort of stuff, I’m sure.
Still another wonder you might have is, when I put you in my story without your permission, maybe against your wish and will, why then couldn’t I have been gracious enough to make you heroic, like Odysseus in the Odyssey or Aeneas in the Aeneid, or Beowulf in Beowulf. Had I done so, you might point out, I could have called my story the You-ey or the You-id or just plain You, all of which would be shorter, less awkward, and not as off-putting titles than the one I’ve chosen to go with. Or you might wonder why I wasn’t willing to make you at least almost heroic, like Nick Adams in the story “The Killers” and Ernest Hemingway, the teller of that tale. Had I done so, it might occur to you that I could have called my story “The Killers Redux,” a title in which the Latin would add a touch of much needed class. “Redux” seems to have caught people’s fancy in the last few decades.
To be up front with you, let me tell you I’ve devoted a considerable amount of thought to heroism. And, alas, I’ve come to a melancholy conclusion: in this our time during which the bomb has been dropped and more bombs are standing ready to be let go and missiles are being launched day in and day out, I’m afraid—I use the phrase as more than a verbal mannerism—I haven’t been able to hit upon a jot of antique heroism or a tittle of Lost Generation almost heroism anywhere around my neck of the woods of the world to invest in you or any other character in my story. I concede that apprising you of how necessary you in the story of your life are to my story and of how vulnerable you in my story are to the way I choose, no, really must make use of you, provides you scant consolation.
Despite whatever wishes, wonderings, complaints, resentments, reproaches, angers, grudges, etc. you in the story of your life might be nursing because of my treatment of you in my story “B/Will/iam/ie and Al and Max and You and I,” I’m not going to let you in the story of your life off the hook. Not quite yet. Not before my story is finished. And my story won’t be finished until the you in my story ask the you in the story of your life a question. What that question is, I in my story am not going to tell you. In fact, I in the story of my life can’t. Which is why I had to write this story.
See, you’re in my story lots. And there’s lots of you in my story. Maybe you’ll never get out.
“BARE RUINED CHOIRS WHERE LATE THE SWEET BIRDS SANG”
Père Patou couldn’t stomach the omelet with mushrooms Esther had whipped up for him. After all these years you’d think the woman would concede that a few bites of the baguette M. Jabot had baked early that morning, dipped in black coffee, made all the breakfast he wanted. Of course she couldn’t be expected to understand he had little appetite for food at this hour because the taste of the body and blood of our Lord was still on his tongue. Then again, it might be that she wanted Père Patou to have something substantial in his belly on this particular morning since, without knowing what it was about, she’d found out he was to attend a meeting of the village council. His apprehension regarding the outcome gave him even less desire for food than usual.
Returning to bed after using the commode—at fifteen before two, it turned out—he’d lain awake listening for the bells. When he’d heard the first of the three double strokes, dindelles they were called, he hadn’t been certain what the hour was. Rather than twist the switch on the bedside lamp to provide light for him to read the face of the nickel-plated alarm clock, on three milking-stool legs with a silver beret on top, he’d waited until he’d heard the chiming of two o’clock to learn how much of the night was yet to come. After that he’d merely dozed.
When the three dindelles had struck at fifteen minutes before five, Père Patou had pushed up his bones, pulled himself to a sitting position on the side of the bed, and crossed himself. Then he’d knelt and said aloud his morning devotions, first the Paternoster, next Je vous salue, Marie, finally a prayer to St. Francis de Sales. After flicking on the lamp, he’d switched off the alarm. Although he’d had more than ample time to get himself ready to say Mass, he’d decided it was senseless to go back to bed only to lie awake for another half hour.
Neither the bells nor the crowing of M. Grenier’s cocks had awakened him. The need to relieve himself had. And during the night the striking of bells had not kept him from sleep. That was the point, the very point. And it wasn’t that he was without any hearing. His ears still took in the barking of the village dogs,sometimes even the mewing of the doves that roosted in the cupola on the old tithe barn, now used for storing deconsecrated statues, cracked fonts, and broken church vases. When the wind was brisk and from the south, he could also pick up the clanging of the bells on the cows and goats in the pastures of M. Leschemell and the crying of the ewes of M. Constans when their kids were taken from them, in the adjoining meadow, just below the village.
But it was true that for some time now the cheeping of the chaffinches that flew into the presbytery garden to feed on the bread crumbs he scattered every morning after breakfast were growing fainter and fainter. And to himself he acknowledged that when a mere handful of parishioners attended Mass, the responses were so indistinct that he was timing his leading of the liturgy to the length of time he knew it took worshipers to give each response. Still and all, M. Le Tourneau had been wrong to argue that only because he was going deaf Père Patou was not kept awake by the ringing of church bells throughout the night.
And if M. Le Tourneau was hearing the bells in his sleep, as he insisted, well then? Since he wasn’t awake to know he was hearing them, what matter? No, no, Père Patou refused to believe the bells were affecting M. Le Tourneau’s sleep. Nor had they been an annoyance to anyone in the village until the the businessmen had begun patronizing the Hotel Le Tourneau after the hotelier had converted the old relais into a fashionable establishment. Yes, they were the only ones to complain, outsiders. Everyone in the village, having heard the bells ring day and night within minutes of birth, was so accustomed to the sound that it would never occur to anyone to think of the bells as a nuisance.
Such had been Père Patou’s reply to M. Le Tourneau when he’d asked to be told how the priest could be so certain the bells were not a nightly disturbance. “In any case,” M. Le Tourneau had then thrown back at him, “I’m talking about now, modern times, other people.” “Ah, monsieur,” Père Patou had responded, vigorously holding to his point, “truly, those to whom the village belongs would be lost without the ringing of the bells at all times.” “That remains to be seen, mon père,” the hotelier had retorted, as he’d shown the priest his stoop-shouldered back and walked out of the presbytery with his nose in the air. “And then will you cut the throats of M. Grenier’s cocks?” Père Patou had flung at his heels. M. Le Tourneau was thirty years younger than his pastor.
For more than four hundred years the bells, which had been cast while Savoie’s own St. Francis de Sales was still on this earth, had been striking every quarter hour and had been ringing the Angelus morning, noon and evening, as well as summoning the village to the church. How sweet and mellow those bells were! As Père Patou had pointed out to M. Le Tourneau, even though he’d known the hotelier would brush it aside, inscribed on the shoulder of each bell was WEGHEVENS, MECHLIN, ANNO DNI, 1583. And who could say that for many years before those bells had been carried by wagon all they way from Belgium a more primitive clock had not been chiming time in the village?
Between bites of coffee-soaked bread, Père Patou forcedhimself to swallow a few forkfuls of omelet in hope that this morning, when he needed to rally his forces for what lay ahead, Esther would not light into him for not eating. With all her virtues and good intentions, the woman was a trial, a burden he’d been given to bear to the end. Not only did she take it on herself to decide what he was to eat, but she also assumed the office of mistress of his wardrobe, such as it was.
As evidence of her daily scrubbing on a washboard over a tub, which had her always smelling of lye, Esther placed clean linen undergarments on Père Patou’s bed daily, while he was saying the evening service. Every Saturday a freshly laundered cassock was in the pile, and he had to surrender to her rough red hands the cassock he’d been wearing. Constrained by his self-prohibition against ever offending his housekeeper, who had suffered unspeakable adversity in her life, he had never let her know that he preferred the feel of clothing he’d been wearing to cloth that, freshly laundered, seemed like new. Just as he didn’t mind a bit of fray on his cassock, he was perfectly comfortable with a few spots and stains, reminders of the faults of the flesh.
Without a word of remonstrance, Père Patou put up with the woman’s taking it upon herself to decide when to remove an article of clothing from the chiffonier or closet of his bedroom, without informing him. Something would simply be gone. Then he’d have to go through the annoyance of ordering new linen or a new cassock through M. Fouchet and to wear it with discomfort until it was broken in. Esther even pestered him about his well-worn brogans. Though she didn’t dare confiscate and dispose of them, she regularly covered the scuff marks with polish while reproaching him for not ordering a new pair from the shoemaker in Cruseilles. Père Patou had unusually large feet and it was hard to come up with shoes that didn’t pinch.
Only over his liturgical vestments was he the master. During the half century Esther had been his housekeeper, she’d never put a foot inside the church. A couple of times in the first year or so she’d been in the village, a sixteen year-old then, he’d caught sight of her peering in through the fluted arch whose iron-stropped door was standing open. The way she’d hung there suggested she feared that the God Whose home the church was would strike her dead if she so much as breathed the air inside the sacred building. Yet was not God also her and her people’s God? Still, he couldn’t be sorry that her inhibition put the seedy garments in the presbytery beyond her reach.
So it would appear he’d eaten more of the omelet than he had, Père Patou chopped all that was left into little pieces that he then scraped to one side of his plate and covered with a hunk of bread. He made use of this childish subterfuge fatalistically, realizing Esther surely would discover how much of the omelet she’d prepared lay beneath the bread and would charge him with starving himself Maybe this constant fear of hers was a legacy of her deprivation as a child. This morning he was willing to buy time before being reproached.
While sipping what remained of coffee in his mug, Père Patou withdrew from the pocket of his cassock the letter M. Meunier, the village postman, had delivered to the rectory first thing in the morning. Unfolding it, he read it for the third time. Although he knew it was superstition, for God no longer spoke to men in such ways, he couldn’t rid himself of the feeling the letter was an ill omen. To think—when he’d written to the bishop six weeks ago, immediately after the threatening visit from M. Le Tourneau, no reply had come until this very day. In the intervening time, hearing nothing more from M. Le Tourneau and concluding that the hotelier had decided to drop the matter, Père Patou had thought it best to let sleeping dogs lie. He’d said nothing
Now that it had turned out M. Le Tourneau, rather than giving up, had been carrying on his effort to have the bells silenced at night, the curt formality of the dismissal of his plea for help from above, conveyed not by the bishop himself, or by his suffragan or even by his coadjutor, but by the secretary to the rural dean, was a needle in Père Patou’s heart. The oldest active priest in the diocese, he had served as curè in this village for more than half a century.
1 August 1995
My dear Père Patou:
His Excellency has asked that I make reply to yours of 14 June. Although the Bishop appreciates your calling to his attention the matter your letter speaks to, it is his policy not to intervene in such affairs when the concern is not palpably ecclesiastical.
Confident of your ability to resolve the difference that has arisen, without compromising the diocese while satisfying the parish, his Excellency wishes me to convey his personal respects to you.
I am yours truly,
Herbert Barres
Secretary to the Rural Dean
Mindful of the indifference of the incumbent bishop to the vil-lages under his jurisdiction, Père Patou acknowledged to himself that such laissez-faire did have its fortunate side. Despite regularly dispatched diocesan letters reminding priests to see to it that women of the parish participate in the celebration of the Mass by having them serve as lay readers, Père Patou had not done so. His noncompliance, he reasoned, was not willful disobedience, in that he was certain no woman in the village would be willing to stand behind the lectern and present the epistle. And should one have considered volunteering, she would have been unable to read the Holy Scriptures, for in violation of the edict of le Saint Père, Père Patou was still conducting Mass in Latin.