Morris - Cause for Wonder

B OOKS BY W RIGHT M ORRIS IN B ISON B OOK E DITIONS
Date of first publication at the left

1942 My Uncle Dudley (BB 589)

1945 The Man Who Was There (BB 598)

1948 The Home Place (BB 386)

1949 The World in the Attic (BB 528)

1951 Man and Boy (BB 575)

1952 The Works of Love (BB 558)

1953 The Deep Sleep (BB 586)

1954 The Huge Season (BB 590)

1956 The Field of Vision (BB 577)

1957 Love Among the Cannibals (BB 620)

1958 The Territory Ahead (BB 666)

1960 Ceremony in Lone Tree (BB 560)

1963 Cause for Wonder (BB 656)

1965 One Day (BB 619)

1967 In Orbit (BB 612)

In Preparation

1962 What a Way to Go (BB 636)

1971 Fire Sermon (BB 693)

1972 War Games (BB 657)

Also available from the University of Nebraska Press

Wright Morris: Structures and Artifacts
Photographs 1933-1954

Conversations with Wright Morris (BB 630)
Edited with an introduction by Robert E. Knoll

This book is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents either are productsof the authors imagination or are used in a fictional setting. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental .

Copyright 1963 by Wright Morris
All rights reserved
First Bison Book printing: 1978

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Morris, Wright, 1910

Cause for wonder.

A Bison book.

Reprint of the ed. published by Atheneum, New York. I. Title.

[PA3.M8346Cau 1978] [PS3525.07475] 813.52

Bison Book edition published by arrangement with author.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For Leon Howard

Time Present

One

What led you, just now, to glance at this page? To make a beginning, right? Ive always liked such beginnings as Once upon a time Time might well be my subject. But how does one begin with time? If I knew it might help me to get on with it.

Are you sitting or standing? Im always standing when I start a book. Ready to run if the clerk on duty catches my eye. As a rule I skip the jacket, try the first line or two on for size. A hazardous moment. What if this happened to be it? A beginning. One that might lead to God knows what end. But Im no booklover. In the line of books I prefer the cardshops the booklover cant stomach. Sick cards, sick jokes, sick women, and a small table of books. So few that I might even read one. If theres a turn in my life it came when the sight of a lot of books depressed me. And libraries. Like a photograph of May Day in Red Square. Too many books can be more depressing than not enough. One human face is the world, but the world has no human face.

From my grandfather I have the name Warren and a bedtime story short enough to remember. It began, I was born in a log cabin and there, as a rule, it ended. He wasnt, but never mind. Its the sentiment that matters. What better place to begin than with your back to a log fire? If my Aunt Winona was right he was born at sea, and toward the end of his life thats where he thought he was. At sea. And so he was. In a sea of grass. Where you begin or you end is pretty much a question of what you think.

To make a beginning was not my grandfathers problem, but it is mine. I came too late for the log cabin. The facts are dull and sworn to. 8 lbs. 7 oz., 127 Elm Street, the county seat of Riley County, Kansas. The house still stands. A swing and basket of ferns ornament the porch. A pair of stilts and a scooter made of one skate wheel lie under the steps. Where I left them. Farther back, in the powdery dust, a wooden runner sled and an Irish Mail. Ah ha, so you missed that! A small-fry velocipede more commonly referred to as a handcar. Yellow wire wheels, red pump handle, steered with the feet. You see that I speak with authority.

All of this I determined by peering through the porch slats, but one vital statistic escaped me. The name. The right sort of name stamped on the seat might have bailed me out. Mayflower, Pilgrim, Prairie Schooner, or the like. But not Rosebud. That story has been told. Nothing is worse than a story thats been told.

The summer day I stopped to determine what the name might actually be, the lady of the house, a pastors widow, watched me through a slit in the curtains of her bedroom. Or was it mine? By right of priority. In that room, on good authority, I had been born. With my beginning, however, my mother had made an ending. I may have stood there, like a simpleton, staring. The pastors widow flicked the curtains and a moment later latched the screen to the porch.

A few days ago I received a letter. If youre looking for something never overlook the mailbox. This letter was square, with a heavy black border. The stamp was foreign and showed a goggled, flying skier. I thought of a friend of mine who once collected stamps. I still open letters carefully, as if I had him in mind. This one had been forwarded to me from Quartzite, Arizona. I recognized the hand. My Uncle Fremont Osborn writes a fine Spencerian hand. Never to me, however. Such letters as I get from him come through my aunt, post-marked Boise, Idaho.

That in itself is a story, a beginning, and I let some time pass before opening the letter. My name had first been written with a pen that splattered the ink in an ornamental manner. No hand I recognized. Small, crabbed, and rather hard to read. Nevertheless, I felt that pains had been taken to make it legible. To get it to me. The black border disturbed me. I was looking for a beginning, not an end. Inside I found this card, with the same black border, two short black lines at the center

ETIENNE DULAC
18871962

That was all. As an ending, it was more than enough. I hadnt seen Monsieur Dulac for thirty years: just thirty years. But thought of him I had. Oh yes, and often. For at least twenty years I had thought of him dead. His health had been bad. In some ways he had seemed half dead when I knew him. Or met him. Know him I did not. In an effort to know him I had begun something I had never finished. A book. Appropriately titled Run for Your Life.

It was typical of Dulac, however, to have lived so much longer than anyone had expected. As it was to send me a notice of his death. A guest in his madhouse. I was no more than that. Near the end of November, with a friend, I went out to his place for the weekend. I was there until the snow melted in March. It melted slowly. I gathered from others that was customary, although Riva is not at all close to the Alps. For several years after the war it was behind the iron curtain. I had a half-baked impulse, at the time, to go. It was about a three-hour drive from Vienna, or a four-hour toonerville trip up the Danube. You get off at Stein, then hike back up the canyon toward Ottenschlag. Schloss Riva is about a good two hours walk. Or it was. I have sometimes wondered if the place is actually there, I might have dreamed it. Back at the timethe early thirtiesI had quite a talent for that sort of thing.

The way youll turn an imported object over to see the price tag, and who made it, I turned this card to show the backside. In the same crabbed hand a note said: Services September 19th 4 p.m.