A Woman Named Drown - Padgett Powell (16 page)

"
Better."

My silly little mood was ruined, but it was good to
know you can't rout fifty-year-old men just because other
fifty-year-old men call them The Boys. I shook the yardman's hand. He
gave me the standard black limp, so limp you don't see how it could
be remotely attached to the muscular arm that extends it. I waved
over my head to them as I left the yard. They were indifferent.

A little sanity at six in the morning demonstrated by
men raking leaves for life--by men in full possession of
nothing--jotted down fine in the blurry data column I was filling.

* * *

At ten we sat in the formal dining room at my
mother's request and had what she calls brunch. It is no different
from breakfast, and the dining room is not used even for holidays
now, but for my visits it is brunch in the dining room. Beyond these
alterations of decorum, she ignores me.

She is got up--suit, pearl choker, matching shoes and
bag--to go to the beauty parlor. Between courses, served from the
kitchen by the maid, she asks my father the time.

"
Don't ask me again," he finally says. He
says this without anger, but it sets her off on a vengeful course
anyway.

She looks at me and catches me examining the design
in the china. "That
china's
expensive," she says, looking then directly at my father.

It is a reasonable cue for one to guard himself, set
himself for a blow of the absurd. Her emphasis on china rather than
expensive is a signal that what follows won't be easy to track. But
my father does not prepare for the blow, nor will he share a flicker
of condescension with me.

"
This plate," my mother says, slyly
touching my father's plate, "cost four hundred dollars."
She quickly jerks her finger back, as if the plate has suddenly
gotten hot.

She looks at her finger. Or pretends to. I notice
that she actually looks at me while holding her finger in front of
her face. She wants a sign, one hair of a reaction, to launch into
finer, higher absurdity--to "have a fit," in my father's
parlance. This is, I find, remarkable--she is perfectly and
vigorously logical in the way she can scale into a
tour
de force
of mindlessness. While the content
of her fit will be nuts, the form will be logical, and it has made me
w0nder--my father apparently does not--if her sickness is not partly
or part-time voluntary.

She still looks at her finger. "We had the four
hundred and we had to buy the plate." This is a complex
accusation. I've heard, as I say, its form before, and she means, I
think, that even though we had the money, we were not old-family and
therefore did not already own the china and
had
to buy it--with new money, thereby invalidating in certain senses our
right to even have the heirloom china.

She is saying, I think, that she was a country--club,
new-milli0naire's wife who wasted herself in pursuit of a status that
specifically could not be bought. If I throw her into the fool/
true-fool gradient, she appears to be not unlike the Veteran--someone
gave her a false center to pursue and she did and discovered finally
it was hollow. She had a houseful of River Road furniture and no
family name to match it. She has a houseful of dead fucking niggers.
She was self-important until one day she discovered she was not
important. This, I think, at table, at brunch--and who knows but that
she is mocking even now----is what has unleveled her.

On the sideboard I notice a postcard--out of place in
the unused room--and lean to look at it; as I do, my mother says,
"It's for you."

"
It's what?"

"Read it. Ladyfriend--but I don't have a license
to meddle."

The card is a photo of a romantic scene very much
like the one of Mary in the Sunday supplement, and I see before
anything else M .C.B. signed on the back.

Muhv--

Garden restored. Miss you more than like.
Got sillymental in Fla. (about Stump--don't tell Hoop) and messed up.
Give call. Tunkie Friedeman gave address. Says he knows you'll be
back in the sun soon, ha ha. Said to tell you that. ? Drop by?
Love--

Friedeman? What in the world was going on?
Tunkie
Friedeman?
Conspiracy theory
entered my mind. This was no damned Brownian powder-blown drift. I
felt like Mia Farrow in
Rosemary's Baby
.

Then again, was it only that Mary and Friedeman knew
each other and somehow discovered--did I tell Mary I worked for a
Friedeman and she held her no-bio tongue? Yes. I told her I worked
for a nut. She smiled. She knew him. But how did she know I'd come
home? She didn't. Chanced it. A small endothermic bonding 238
bondings down the thousandfold series that was evolving me unto some
end.

I recalled an early chemistry professor I had who
seemed to have relied entirely upon his sense of smell in achieving
his considerable academic station. On emeritus status, he was
employed to interest freshmen in the magic of chemistry--almost the
alchemy of chemistry--its colors, its aromatic delights, even its
poetry. His chemistry was numberless, headache-free, earthy,
approximate, elegant--a chemistry that seduced worried freshmen. You
may call dicopper oxide, he'd say, cuprous oxide, and copper oxide,
cupric. You may, as the English do, refer to al-you-minium. Bleach is
sodium hypohalite. He'd waft a tube to his Old World nose, hold it to
the light--glacial acetic acid (you may call it condensed vinegar),
or another tube, product of a spuming reaction--sniff--why, it's old
methyl ethyl ketone. What's that brown stuff in there? Some
suspicious student would ask. That, the emeritus Nose Chemist would
say, that is nothing, some trash.

I felt then, with the postcard, as if that was the
only kind of chemist I could reasonably be in this life chemistry--it
would have to be by instinct and it would have to be relied on well.
Mary's card impressed me as not unlike unidentified brown precipitate
in a reaction too complex to probe further in the particular. It was
not trash, but it was finally distracting to know more about it. Mary
and Tunkie Friedeman. Were they lovers? How far back could reactions
in the life series be said to go?

"
What time is it? I'd better get ready. Are you
ready?"

"
Dad, are you still selling the company?"
He looks at me, happy not to have to answer her. "You still
planning to sell?"

"
I have buyers," he says.

"
Who's running it?"

"
It's on auto-pilot." He doesn't want to
talk about it.

"
Would it still be good not to sell?"

"
Smart not to."

"
Isn't my appointment at eleven?" my mother
says.

"
Mother," he says, "the appointment is
at
noon
. It's
always
at noon."

"
Are you ready
?"

He turns from her, stone-faced. Something happens to
me. Before I can say it, my mother announces, "I have
osteopsoriasis."

"
Don't sell," I say.

"
What?"

"
Osteopsoriasis. It's new."

"
I'll do it," I say. "Give me a year."

"
A year? Are you serious?"

"
He's so
handsome
."

Very gravely, as if we have just signed a world
armistice, he stands and rounds the corner of the table, his hand
extended in an arc much wider than the catcher's-mitt position
ceremoniously toward me. We shake.

"
Mother," he orders, "
get
in the car.
You don't want to be late."

"
Not
today
,"
she says. She fairly jogs out of the house.

"
I'll have to drive her around for an hour."
He grins, the first I've seen. "Do we understand each other?"
he says.

"
I think we do," I say, not knowing yet why
I've said what I've said.

"
Why are you in those clothes?"

I persuade him to drop me off at the bus station--he
suggests I take a plane--and we part on very good terms under the GO
BIG RED marquee, his engine running and my mother primping in the
rearview, smiling at herself.

    
A
ll
the way to Knoxville I considered the proper use of new utterance,
its true relation, if any, to the formulations I have been borne
along on. It seems now that new utterance is perhaps the linguistic
equivalent of the kind of living that takes into account backward as
well as forward motion. The maker of new utterance is taking a chance
that he will not close the gap toward meaning, that he may in fact
widen it, as the foolish living I've come to appreciate chances the
same failure to advance and may indeed set one back. On the final bus
home I regarded myself as a kind of Havana Carlisle willing to tell
things anew--willing to wave my cigar about and be misinterpreted, if
that was the cost.

I immediately went to Friedeman's office and with no
delay found him.

"
Tunkie," I said.

He looked up from his desk, his face a wave of
recognition and, I thought, put-on happy-to-see-you mirth. He
solemnly stood and came around to me, extending both hands. He said,
"My son, the fire is renewed?" His manner was altogether
suggestive of a Benedict rather than a Tunkie.

"
I have a year in which to be consumed by it,
Father."

He then looked at me with what I took to be real
delight, and I think it was delight in my assuming a penitant's role,
which made to me altogether more sense about him. His Baptism was a
polite mockery, a new utterance he played with.

"
What in hell are you doing in my brother's
clothes?"

For a moment I was confused, thinking he was yet in
the charade and referring to some ecclesiastical brother. Then; he
did not mean, did he, Stump?

"
I'd know those clothes anywhere."

I sat down and we had a talk, the result of which was
my concluding that there is room in this world for either a whole lot
of coincidence or a whole lot of design, call it what you will. The
short of it was that Tunkie and Stuart (Stump) Friedeman were wild
men and Connie Baker a wild woman (they all called her Connie, as had
Hoop; only I, her no-bio boy, had used the formal Mary) and they were
in love and Stump won." At least he had for a time.

Now, it would seem, Tunkie was the one to claim
spoils, though I did not learn, or care to know, any of it. I was
still, it seemed in his office, as now, on no-bio status, and I
thought it certainly best he remain specifically so with respect to
Mary and me.

"
I have a year."

We discussed my research--his research--and I was
surprisingly clear about where I'd left off, and we concurred that we
should be able to determine the particular boron-lithium mechanic we
sought well within a year and that I would go free with a signed
degree.

"
Tunkie," I said at the end, still
incredulous that a Dr. Friedeman could become a fast-car teenager
named Tunkie before my very eyes.

"Time is a marvel,"
he said, standing, concluding our intimacies. "I know full well
you are enough of a scientist." We were back to science. It was
nice to have struck a gentleman's agreement as we had in a world of
spin accelerators and Fourier analyzers and computers called NERDS.

* * *

So that is how I came finally to take notes again,
and again notes of science in a blue-gridded engineering notebook, on
a heavy slate lab bench, down which I sight a tiny army of test tubes
in white polypropylene racks taking aliquots from an automatic
pipette. It is a tiny induction into service: the stiff fellows at
glassy attention taking their inoculations like the best of 
soldiers. I will march them into chromatographs, fire electrons at
them, freeze them. Some will step back and some will step forward.
Together we will answer a question about a structure so small the ink
of this word could insulate it against the light of day for a
thousand years.