A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (8 page)

But this time the real desperation of father and son did not wake. Their hearts were not in the quarrel; it was not the same. Somehow in the interval they had exchanged a general pardon. Into affectionate indifference their reproaches trailed away. The son noticed how they placed themselves in the automobile, their shoulders in contact, unshrinking.

The father spoke again. “Well, your sister hasn’t anywhere else to go. They haven’t a cent of money.”

“I’ll attend to that.”

“But you must not burden yourself with their problems. We’ll get along. You have your own way to make.”

They drove away out between the farms. Now it was night. There were shooting stars, ever falling but not landing; certainly somewhere a hundred adolescent wishes leaped up vainly to meet each one. On porches and in orchards, at pianos here and there, in dimmed automobiles, in impoverished privacy of all kinds, couples were coming together. They passed a number of them. Without doubt, in hopeful tones as if they had been cures for illnesses, marriages were being discussed by these strangers; and chances of people’s dying being speculated upon, as if illness were a betrothal with death; and the futures of children fixed, incidentally. Innumerable as bubbles in a restless flood, family circles were being formed or broken—a sighing embrace, a breaking pain. The sounds in the night did not seem appropriate to these grave though common events—only music would have been. Hoarse and faint were the cries of air and water; and the soul’s all too quavering.

But recalling the scene at the supper table, the young man thought that utterances more radically tragic had been made there than those in any book or play. When gentle ambitious poor men and women broke down, when domestic pain and want were thus exposed by mistake—were there not dialogues more desperate, reproaches more courageous and opener avowals, than any ever designed by great lyric intellects to reveal evil heroes, or the condemned to death, or saints in ecstasy? Was not existence then stripped more nearly naked? No writer could put these humbler griefs in print. They might in great part be spoken without words; so indeed, an hour ago, they had been. They might take the form of a gaze, or of twisted muscles around one mouth or another, or of a change of color—the rainbow whiteness of dead flesh on some living face. A sentence of death might thus be passed—without any blame theoretically, without even intending to hurt—upon a lover, for example, by his beloved: the expression growing in one second old or (worse still) common, and over the eyes which told the truth, the eyelids kindly sinking shut. Or if a few phrases were spoken, they were too conventional, too discourteous, to have the least poetry. Or they were so obscure, depending for their fatal sense upon so remote and complex an entanglement of incidents, of habits of the heart, echoing so many previous faint phrases, that the whole of a book or play, leading up to them, would not suffice to make their burden clear. In the text of humanity, such were the passages of genius. Thus only could the worst be said; thus only could the lesson, the sentence entirely and accurately characterizing mankind, the summary truth, be expressed.

Then, considering what had happened as a story, he understood that if one added that it had occurred years before, that the babe was now a man, the grandparents dead, the parents old, the uncle (himself) some sort of worn powerful personage, or perhaps a derelict; or if one merely prophesied that in the remote future such things would take place—none of it would be altered fundamentally.

For time is an unreliable thing, he thought; it does not steadily pass but weaves back and forth. At one manifold moment he had felt himself to be a rebellious babe and its imaginary father, his brother-in-law’s as well as his father’s son, and himself at he knew not what age. He had become a man, but without learning not to feel like a child, not to relapse backward into immaturity for an hour. In a church steeple, alone in the country with its graveyard, past which they drove, he heard ten o’clock strike. So the hour passed; but it would return. Soon he would depart again, to his distant ambitions—the necessary infatuation with himself, the frail glamour of the inappropriate rewards, the remorse incessantly attendant upon his faults—all interrupted here, now, by the experience of his early youth, and all to be interrupted at intervals, always, wherever he was, even by what had happened that day. Always, in an ephemeral western town in himself, in his mind, under a humble roof and as it were amid disunited frustrated elders, there would be the babe weeping, ungratified, bound in its bed, for its own good. The present summer would never quite go by. Time could not be depended upon to sweep him safely, normally, onward; but would be forever letting him fall back into what was over and done with, and letting him, enfevered by the unwanted past, leap weakly ahead into what was to come, to no avail.

And he thought that he (and all other vain men wishing to be strong, even if they could not be strong) might as well resolve to agree with this busy force which no name suited better than another— time or nature or destiny or god or anonym. Maniacal worker, mad about its art, invisible and uninvited, it went on darkening with wild strokes their lives that were but scattered square inches of its design. Mindreading gambler, it kept playing with them and with facts for unknown stakes. Stern economist, it had meant this part of the West to be poor; and the oppressive forests and sterile hills having been mastered, introduced education and extravagance and optimism and credit to keep living conditions hard as they had been. Just now, as if it had gazed at him personally with its amorous eyes, it had made use of cruel circumstances—poverty and illness and half-incestuous affections—to give him a son, irrespective of his habits and against his will.

In his mind, as he sat beside his good discouraged father, as they drove some miles away from their troubled home, these exaggerated ideas sounded by turns like a harsh Te Deum and a lullaby and a prayerful plea. Could his sister recover? Was the babe, his theoretical son, in good hands, sufficiently strong and not too blundering hands? Mind your own business, he said to himself; God will provide.

The old moon rose; and by its light along the road, he saw, as he had never seen it before, the glacier-built West, electrical in atmosphere, hard at heart: the hills without any consoling vineyards, without placid groups of sheep, and the weedy fields of ripening foods. Whatever had made him think, with vulgar images, when he first returned, that this was an abundant land? It was wondrously poor. Heaven itself might have formed it to be its opposite, a place in which to think of it with desperate longing, with virile love. In the weak moonlight the earth and the air had an appearance of painted clapboards and shaky turrets: dwellings for souls that were untamed and immature. He understood that in spite of changes it was a mystery still, a wilderness, vain and ashamed, waiting its turn to be a good place. And in it, with his dubious abilities and yet rudimentary desires, the baby that he loved, by this time, was asleep.

Occasionally last winter Allen Porter would mention a young man of sonorous name and address, Mr. Jaris Hawthorn of Clamariscassett, Maine, who as a lover had briefly amused but not satisfied him at all, and who thereafter bored him as a friend. He said that he would not think of introducing him to any of us because (a) he is a bad painter and a pseudo-intellectual, and so obtuse and pushing and clinging as to make any merely social relationship with him a nuisance; and (b) his sex is so monstrously large that sexual intercourse with him is practically impossible. I must say that neither the report of his monstrosity nor of his ambitious and sentimental spirit really dismayed me. For Allen in bed is easily affrighted; and when it comes to talk of art, excesses of friendliness, etc., he has less patience than anyone. With his lively and improper sense of humor, Allen presented this phenomenal fellow to Pavlik, on account of the obscene way Pavlik talks and the freakish pictures he has painted. But nothing came of that, he believed. Pavlik as a rule is unwilling to risk getting caught in such misdemeanor by his darling, Charles, who, I presume, would simply feel authorized by it to go and do likewise or worse.

When Allen heard of my trip to Maine he suggested that I see Hawthorn,
quand meme;
we talked some sense and some nonsense about it, and I promised; but evidently he thought me too proud or prudent to do any such thing. Having taken stock of Sorrento and looked at the map, I wrote Hawthorn and proposed our meeting somewhere halfway. He did not reply promptly; and meanwhile Monroe had written that George’s keeping company with young Chitwood worried him; so I had begun to worry again, to dream despairingly of Ignazio, and to write those above-mentioned letters. At last an answer came from Hawthorn, matter-of-fact and cordial: he would meet me on the verandah of the Windsor Hotel in Belfast at ten a.m. on Wednesday. I ruefully thought that I was no longer quite in the mood or in the pink of condition for such a meeting; but I did not let myself think much, one way or the other. For it might well turn out to be the sort of folly that I owe it to myself and even others to stoop to upon occasion, according to the rule of my health and my particular morality. And, even if no healthful pleasure was to be had of him at journey’s end, no doubt the journey would be of interest. I should see some sea-captains’ houses and some variations of the Maine landscape. And it seemed to me that I might turn to stone in Sorrento, to stone or to wood, if I did not go somewhere else, do something.

On Wednesday, Ernest, the bright youth who tends Frances’ furnaces, woke me at daybreak; and I gulped some potent warmed-over coffee; and he drove me to Ellsworth where I had to wait an hour for the bus. I was in my most absurd matutinal state, absent and giddy, like one strongly bestirring himself under hypnosis. The bus was of the vast and delectable streamlined type with powerful engine and terrible cry and springs like a dream. At first I thought its motion might make me sick. Maine highways are narrow, with very few motorists on them, but those few are plucky and stubborn. The bus would roar whenever we sighted one, and without slacking up in the least, descend upon him, then suddenly digress and swing around him, with two wheels off the pavement. South of Ellsworth there is a succession of long hills. As we flew down into the valleys between them—so delicately was every bit of shock mollified by the mattress-like suspension under us—we suddenly ceased to feel the road, resuming it with a slight tremor only when we began to climb again. After a certain term of chastity, to say nothing of particular discouragements such as this summer’s, I always think of dying, with no very clear distinction between the longing for it and the dread of it. So I was frightened by this ride and somewhat fascinated by my fright. But I forced myself to entertain other thoughts; to admire the poor farms and the old towns through which we passed, and the successive waterways, the play of peculiar Maine light, and the wonderful absence of billboards: a sort of passion and chastity of landscape.

I arrived first at the rendezvous. No reference had been made in my letters or Hawthorn’s to my spending the night; suddenly I felt ashamed to be taking all that for granted; therefore I hastily checked my bag inside the hotel. The porch agreed upon was half a block long, separated from the parked cars of Main Street by a jigsaw balustrade; and it had a neat alignment of rocking chairs on it. I sat in a rocking chair and read
Time.
No one else sat; a good many stepped briskly along the sidewalk, and a good many drove in and out of town, on more respectable business than mine, I thought. Then it occurred to me that neither of us had any idea of the other’s appearance. I knew only one thing about him, and that one thing, of all I might have known, the least perceptible, the least practicable mark of identification. Which at least brought to my mind the fact that this constituted the worst behavior, the most grotesque episode, of my entire life. What, frankly speaking, was I sitting there waiting for, watching for? It might have been an obscene drawing in the style of El Poitevin or Vivant Denon: a giant phallus out for a ride in a car. And what part would it hold the wheel with, and how would it honk, I asked myself—ribald laughter all provoked but hushed in me, along with other more and more mixed emotion.

Naturally, bitter regret for my great days as a lover assailed me. Also a fresh and terrible kind of sense of devotion to the two whom I love, who love me, who cannot keep me happy, whom I torment and disappoint year in and year out, ached in my grotesque heart. With which my pride also started up, at its worst. To think that I should have come to this: sex-starved, in a cheap provincial hotel humbly waiting for a total stranger; and it should be so soon, at thirty-eight! But, I must say, then a certain good nature quickened in me as well, thank God; an amused appreciation of myself. Once more I summoned up courage to believe—scowling a little, grinning a little, gritting my teeth—that in the considerable brotherhood of middle-aged men in unlucky sexual plight, not many are my peers in this respect and that respect at least. G.D. on the Bowery. A.E.A. or B.K. in Turkish baths: my ventures no doubt are as undignified as theirs, my sensations probably less rapturous than theirs, but … But my life is the oddest. As a result of years of perfect intercourse, unforgettable, my self-consciousness is extraordinary. Living as I do, undivorced—with those I have most desired still the closest to me—I am embarrassed in the pursuit of pleasure by their alluring noble example; handicapped by trickery of my own spirit, my own flesh; impoverished by tribute. Nevertheless I have been able to keep a more level and subtle head than G.D., a more fearless temper than A.E.A., a soberer habit than B.K. In the very efficacy of my excitements there is something like a practical morality. My very sense of humor about it all seems somehow poetical. And if I ever have occasion to tell this tale, for example, I shall tell it well. So I said to myself, boasted to myself …

By that time, with mechanical eye, I had read
Time
from cover to cover. In any case I could not take any further interest in the sad international facts it so blithely reported, nor any other particular facts, not even the facts of my presence where I was, and why, and what would come of it. I was under an introspective spell. I was interested in only the wondrous tiresome way my mind works, always the same way, no matter what it has to do, incorruptible by what it has to deal with. It was fascination of only the sense of life in general, in the abstract, all of a piece: life of which, like everyone else alive, I am daily, gradually, dying … Which mystic fit, as it might be called—in almost entire forgetfulness of time and place and purpose and self—seemed the purest kind of experience of all. It can occur only when one’s sense of reality has failed; when one’s habitual way of thinking of one’s self has broken down somehow. It occurs in sexual intercourse, but, alas, not often.