A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (6 page)

There had been some changes. The younger sister, grown tall as a goddess, blunt and sensitive—she was working now between terms of college at a humiliating job in the town. Parents suddenly seem older when they have need of one. His mother, now that the childbearing epoch with its self-denial and solitude was over, attached importance to plebian comforts and the opinion of her neighbors. His father had no savings, was dissatisfied with his work, and being vague of intellect but powerfully imaginative, dreamed a pitiful ending, as if his life were a poem. His brother-in-law was in financial straits. His married sister was still in love but sick. Her well-cut cheeks were sallow; and seeing the penalties of love, judging that existence would be vapid without it, her short-sighted sapphire eyes had grown insufferably humble. Her infant son, less than a year old, was the first of the third generation, the reason for the hardest work, the object of the most far-reaching anxieties, and for the other son (his uncle) the object of penetrating emotion. It happened that he had no child by those he loved, nor did he know how to plan to have one.

The child seemed ideal: humanity and animality united, simplified almost to nothing, all the possible plays of mind with flesh— character in its first incarnation as a sort of worm. Now he lay, never still, with the motions of a sea-weed. Now disappointment possessed him, and his whole body turned red with sorrow. Now for lack of other intentions, holding on to something, he dropped his weight on his heels and sharply straightened, sprang and sprang up and down in one place. Naked and murmuring in someone’s clasped hands he slipped about, revolved inside his skin if he could not do more, as a fish or eel fresh from its element might. When he slept, the dimpled body (half-naked, the smallest pearls of sweat shining a little on it) seemed to grow heavier, with the fainted look of hot-weather flowers, the classic hands wide open. If under surveillance his will-power fixed upon some forbidden goal, softly, maniacally, he would maneuver and struggle—until wearier than he, one took him elsewhere, to other stimuli. The young man’s heart would be in his throat, for he knew it well, this pathos of obstinacy; it was not in his power to renounce, either.

The work of the household—badly organized, for all were distracted by tenderness and worry—turned about this proud baby. It exhausted them every day; the washing and ironing, the cooking, the heating of water and the bathing, the cleaning. Often the young mother could only give advice and look on, shamefaced; now and then she herself needed attention. The child woke at five in the morning, was fed at short intervals upon steamed vegetables, fruit, porridge, and mutton juice, as well as milk, and had to be put to sleep three times in the twenty-four hours.

The home-comer worked as best he could, chiefly as nursemaid. He fed the baby and endured his fits of temper, dressed and un dressed him, and undertook to teach him regularity in his lower functions—the muscles and the organs so powerful in miniature, insubordinate; the sounds of sensuousness and displeasure melting into each other lightly. He bathed and powdered him; the sweet-smelling hands struck his mouth, and screams of panic broke forth if the downy head was laid too low, too near the bathwater. By the small fenced bed he kept drawing away the bottle of milk from the inattentively palpitant mouth; and only the threat of deprivation made its appetite take precedence over sleep.

If he had had a son this should and might well have been he. The questioning carriage of the long head, the mouth a little loosely pouted, the light hard eyes—they were to be seen in photographs of himself at that, indeed at any age. However, all his mother’s children had looked alike, and here was more than resemblance. His character recognized itself: its outline, the tendencies, the elements. The reactions to discipline, to sensation, to boredom, were his own. In himself, also, rude and selfish vigor was offset by sensibility as defenseless as if a layer of skin were lacking. He noted (it might have been by introspection) the pitiful fury, the sudden fatigues that were like falling ill, the gentle coma after a refreshment of tears. There was the same inability to abandon an ambition, the same aptitude for enjoying others, for loving others—but in proportion to enjoyment only. They were made of the same material, by one dread prescription.

Spellbound, the bachelor felt neither monotony nor fatigue, no matter what he undertook. While the little one slept he strayed about in the others’ way, or all night long tossed voluptuously on the warm mattress, with the strangest lassitude of jealousy, felicity, dread. Remembering how closely in the past he had skirted disgrace and misfortune, he feared for the child; and thus looking ahead, feared for himself too—the rest of fate. So much meaningless time had to pass; should he go, or wait here to see what ensued? Of course he could not stay very much longer; but toward himself and his distant activities, felt an indifference that was all but loss of memory. So much fantastic feeling—and he had no right to it. It was folly to fancy himself a father. For he never would have the least authority over the child’s life, except by other’s default. How great indeed were the chances against there being any satisfaction for either of them in this kinship: the years between the two generations; the natural jealously of his humbled brother-in-law (the child’s real father); his own expectations, fastidious and maybe tyrannical; the boy’s probable rebellion, when manhood came, with its need to feel unique and ungoverned in the world.

But in spite of this reasoning the possessive impulse lasted and reasoned on its own account. Perhaps he would never have any other son. Having conceived of this one as his, having found himself in one baby—perhaps he would be repelled by the fear of begetting a stranger—just as frustrated lovers often find one remembrance standing between them and all further reality. Daydreaming, he felt confused excitements of having a son but no wife, a sister but no wife and no son; and with vague ideas of incest his mind played, even ironically—the pang without the remorse, the consequence without the sin. That, indeed, was how the extreme fondness of a chaste family, forever hurting and caressing, fleeing and coming home, ought to end to be logical.

And the child’s mother had been his dearest before any other was known, while they were growing up. She had been exquisite, swayed by a hint or a compliment, never for a moment unaffected by her admiration of him, all wistful adaptability. It had been a funereal flowery period. They had made music and read together, penetrated by the same dream-feeling about the future, always conscious of doom—the tears starting at the first note of one or two German songs. Protestant children, each had made an effort to please his own soul as if it had been an awful God, confusing it also with the other’s, so that pity and self-pity interlaced. From time to time an illness of hers, or an operation, had pointed to the possibility of her dying. In the entire family, the imagination was always alarmed. There had been more and more panic in his tenderness; and the relation might indeed have made them both very unhappy if they had not been separated, and if in the interval she had not chosen to be happy (and unhappy) with another love. She had found her young husband, worldly if not worldly-wise. She had grown more conservative in temperament, more realistic; and her health had improved. Now there was some distance and a great difference between the brother and sister, which they liked to think that memory bridged. He could not be sorry that her affection had become somewhat conventional, somewhat careful to resist influence; for he thought of the former poetic intimacy as a prelude, perhaps to death, though, in fact, it had not been so.

But now the apprehensive family felt that she might still die, though no one said a word. Her eyes were too radiant and she looked at them too long. She rarely grew angry; and now when it did happen, it seemed too easy to control and too impersonal. She had always had a delicate exalted manner, like that of a little countrified saint, not destined to live long; but there had been enough affection about it to charm and reassure. Now all was genuine, and at times she frightened those who remembered the dangers years before.

Her husband was one of those hesitant men who inspire and content women, often by a tonic happiness making heroines of them, often also calling for heroism, alas. He was far from powerful at making money, which in hard or extravagant times might seem the more desirable virility. It happened that his family had been more comfortable, and higher up in the world, than hers; and he had fallen in love as some spoiled princeling with a milkmaid, meaning to lift her above the mean frugalities to which she had been born, and he had fallen. Penniless even then, both the vanity and the goodness of his heart let him believe he could. And the magic facility of early marriage, so favorable to attendant illusions, let him think for a while that he was doing so. But he was very self-indulgent in innocent ways, resenting every check, and over-ambitious to establish his darling in the ease she deserved, to frame their relation with the elegances it suggested. Sometimes he felt his incompetence as if it had been an amorous infirmity, and in shame grew still more ineffectual. If ever he had looked at things at their worst, he would have been good for nothing at all. His young wife knew this, and often let him, for his own sake, pamper her; and consented to new errors in hopes that it would encourage him to redeem the old. Always a desperate optimism scattered the facts out of his mind. Pride and sensibility joined to make a coward of him. So fervently did he wish to do well that he told himself hopeful untruths, and believed those he had to tell others. Thus a net of enslaving cleverness, diminishing credit, discouragement, and debt, was spread and kept strong. They were well caught in it even before the child was born and she fell ill. Forced then to take refuge in her humble home, his affliction was complete, though courteously borne. It was sharpened by lack of sympathy for this effusive tribe, too honest, all too poetic, and too fond; and indeed their pride in good works and their intimacy were often impolite to the outsider.

Throughout this puerile but ominous comedy of hand-to-mouth living, an idyllic intercourse kept the young pair in accord. Though she had none of his illusions about their situation, she had been happier than he from the start; for love seemed to her a sufficient share of the rewards of living. He was as courteous in possession as he had been in courtship, pure in speech and idealistically jealous. No unlicensed relation could have been more poignantly imprudent than this married love, entangled with debts. It was veiled in the daytime by anxiety, and a little cold at night, as if modesty fell with the dew, but never tired. Though not independent, it was unsocial; from their hopeless juvenile embrace they looked down upon the whole world. Even his injustice and lack of scruples flattered her. Her own scruples intact, she tried to keep their relations to others honorable, but brought to the task a strengthening sense of being preferred even to honor. At times she was hard and skilful to hide his weakness, at others she confessed to the spell under which she lived and wished always to live—the petty mystery of his humanity, the ignominy of her practical fate. Now she lied for him to strangers; now became a child to her own people and looked at him and at life like a puritan judge, but loved him still.

The childbirth had been accompanied by a dull and clumsy doctor, who took the worst damages as a matter of course. Already needlessly injured, she had been allowed by this fatalist and by her husband, determined to hope for the best, to get up almost at once like a primitive wife. There had been the care of the baby and all the hard work of the small home. Stimulated by necessity and by motherhood’s mystic pleasures, she had kept on without help for almost a year. The child was a strong animal, and having before his birth fattened upon her strength directly, now required in a variety of ways all that was left. It was terrible to consider: the new phoenix and the old, the new sprout hollowing out the disintegrating root. And nature, making no exceptions, visited her with its usual wonderworking fevers, to which the wounded womb responded like some unbalanced mind in which, at intervals, a flood of recollections of one past agony runs bright. And a burden as of invisible rocks had to be borne, which, as if the law of gravitation had been suspended, was heavy in every direction at once, downward, upward, sideways. Usually too enfeebled even to lift her child from his bed, and too assured of her husband’s inefficacy to dream a secure upbringing for him, with or without her, she felt guilty for having had a child at all. Her equivocally sad eyes on the lively body being cared for by someone else, gave away her secret. His birth was her crown; but she was so poor that a crown disgraced her.

One night she was able to take a walk with her brother, and they went a little way out of town, around an old mill-pond. As it happened the world that evening looked altogether reasonable, well built, neither rich nor poor. They could see across many fields and roads, where workhorses, some red with a prehistoric bearing and some dappled like phantoms, were going home, and automobiles, more numerous, were racing hither and thither with rough sighs. Around them were trees which as they walked slipped back, each at a different rate in the perspective, and otherwise moved not at all; for there was no wind. Around the trees and beyond them, around the whole, rose the air, the sky—not quite yellow, like marble but softer. The surface of the pond reflected well. Frogs lightened the silence just enough. Very near the water, they stood still on the path.

“Look at our shadows,” he said. “We have two heads like playing cards, and four arms.”

“Then I am the Queen of Spades and you,” she said, “are the King of Hearts.”

“Oh no—the Knave.”

“For that matter, I guess Spades are no worse than Hearts for bringing bad luck,” she said.

“Do you remember when we were children, how mother would not let us play cards, and there was only one old pack in a bureau drawer?”

“To play solitaire with when someone was sick. If you were sick you couldn’t work or improve your mind, so then it wasn’t a waste of time.”