A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (6 page)

"Yes, we do. Mother said if you went, we could go."

"Suppose you drown."

"She thinks you won't let us drown."

"The hell I won't!"

"Well, are you coming?"

"Go on, now, damn it! Get out of here! Go do something else."

He would fold his hands and shut his eyes, the picture of hope
defeated.

Sometimes he would be quiet and sad-seeming. Always at those times
he sang the same song:

Was there, somewhere, a woman he missed, or was he mindful that
he was getting older, or did he just like the song? He had a good voice,
and he sang well.

For fifty years and more I have been asking myself, What was he? What
manner of a man? For I have never been sure. There are things that I
remember, things that I have heard, and things that I am able (a little) to
imagine. But what he was seems always to be disappearing a step or two
beyond my thoughts.

He was, for one thing, a man of extraordinary good looks. He had
style, not as people of fashion have it (though he had the style of fashion
when he wanted it), but as, for example, certain horses have it: a selfawareness so complete as to be almost perfectly unconscious, realized in
acts rather than thoughts. He wore his clothes with that kind of style. He
looked as good in work clothes, I thought, as he did dressed up. Clothes
did not matter much to me, and yet I remember being proud to be with
him when he was dressed up-in a light summer suit, say, and a straw
boater-for I thought he looked better than anybody. He was a big man,
six feet two inches tall and weighing a hundred and eighty pounds. He
had a handsome, large-featured face with a certain fineness or sensitivity that suggested possibilities in him that he mainly ignored. His eyes, as
Grandma loved to say, were "hazel," and they were very expressive, as
responsive to thought as to sight. He loved ribaldry, raillery, impudence.
He spoke at times a kind of poetry of vulgarity.

And yet there was something dark or troubled in him also, as though
he foresaw his fate; I felt it even then. I have a memory of him with a certain set to his mouth and distance in his eyes, an expression of difficult
acceptance, as if he were resigned to being himself, as if perhaps he saw
what it would lead to. His silences, though never long, were sometimes
solemn and preoccupied. When he was still in his twenties, his hair had
begun to turn gray.

For another thing, he was as wild, probably, as any human I have ever
known. He was a man, I think, who was responsive mainly to impulses:
desire, affection, amusement, self abandon, sometimes anger.

When he felt good, he would be laughing, joking, mocking, mimicking, singing, mouthing a whole repertory of subverbal noises. He would
say-and as Yeager Stump later told me, he would do-anything he
thought of. He would lounge, grinning, in his easy chair and talk outrageously, as if merely curious to hear what he might say.

I was in the third grade when the teachers at our school asked the
students to ask their fathers to volunteer to build some seesaws on the
playground. Henry and 1, knowing our father would not spare the time,
brought the matter before Uncle Andrew.

"Well, college," he said, "I'll take it under consideration. Tell all the
women teachers to line up out by the road, and I'll drive by and look 'em
over. It might be I could give 'em a little lift."

He had, I am sure, no intention of helping with the seesaws; he never
had been interested in a school. But Henry, who was in the second grade,
dutifully relayed the message to his teacher. I remember well the difficulty of hearing Henry's teacher repeat to my teacher Uncle Andrew's
instructions. As I perfectly understood, our teachers' outrage was not
necessarily contingent upon Henry's indiscretion; Uncle Andrew would
have delivered his suggestion in person if the circumstances had been
different and it had occurred to him to do so.

At times he seemed to be all energy, intolerant of restraint, unpredictable. His presence, for so small a boy as I was, was like that of some large male animal who might behave as expected one moment and the
next do something completely unforeseen and astonishing.

One morning we went to the Bower Place only to find Charlie Branch
stalled for want of a mowing machine part. We started back to Hargrave
to get the part, Uncle Andrew driving complacently along at the wartime
speed limit, and I chinning the dashboard as usual. We got to a place
where the road went down through a shallow cut with steep banks on
both sides, and all of a sudden Chumpy and Grover Corvin stepped into
the road in front of us. Chumpy and Grover were just big teenage boys
then, but they were already known as outlaws and bullies; a lot of people
were afraid of them. They wanted a ride, and by stepping into the road
they meant to force Uncle Andrew to stop. What he did was clap the
accelerator to the floor and drive straight at them. His response was as
instantaneous and all-out as that of a kicking horse. He ran them out of
the road and up the bank, cutting away at the last split second. We drove
on as before. He did not say a word.

While Uncle Andrew farmed and did whatever else he did, Aunt Judith
and her mother busied themselves with the care and maintenance of the
Hargrave upper crust. Aunt Judith's mother had been born a Hargrave, a
descendant of the Hargrave for whom the town was named, and so Aunt
Judith was virtually a Hargrave herself. By blood she was only a quarter
Hargrave, but by disposition and indoctrination she was 100 percent, as
her mother expected and perhaps required. The two of them belonged
to the tightly drawn little circle (almost a knot) of the female scions of
the first families of Hargrave - a complex cousinship that preserved and
commended itself in an endless succession of afternoon bridge parties.
At these functions everybody was "cud'n" somebody: Cud'n Anne,
Cud'n Nancy, Cud'n Charlotte, Cud'n Phoebe, and so on. Theirs was an
exclusive small enclosure that one could not enter or leave except by
birth and death. My mother, for example, was excluded for the original
sin of having been born in Port William - an exclusion which I believe
she understood as an escape.

This feminine inner circle had of course a masculine outer circle to
which Uncle Andrew pertained by marriage and in which he participated
(being incapable of silence, let alone deference) by snorts, hoots, spoofs,
jokes, and other blasphemies. He was particularly intrigued by the fervent cousinship of the little class that he had wedded, and he loved to enlarge it by addressing as "cud'n" or "cuz" any bootblack, barfly, yardman, panhandler, dishwasher, porter, or janitor he happened to encounter in
the presence of his wife and mother-in-law. His favorite name for Aunt
Judith was "Miss Judy-pooty," but he also called her "Cud'n Pud'n." Her
mother he named "Miz Gotrocks" in mockery of her love of elaborate
costume jewelry and big hats, and her little pair of pinch-nose glasses on
a silver chain. But he also called her, as occasion required, "Cud'n
Mothah" and "Momma-pie." The latter name, because we children
picked it up from him, was what everybody in our family came to call her.

Aunt Judith, as I judge from a set of photographs that used to hang in
Momma-pie's bedroom, had been a pretty girl. She was an only child,
raised by her divorced mother, who had been an only daughter. Aunt
Judith and Momma-pie were a better matched pair than Aunt Judith and
Uncle Andrew AuntJudith had grown up in the protective enclosure prescribed by Momma-pie's status and character; Uncle Andrew had grown
up in no enclosure that he could get out of. That the two of them married young and in error is plain fact. Why they got married-or, rather,
why Uncle Andrew married Aunt Judith-is a question my father puzzled over in considerable exasperation for the rest of his life. He always
reverted to the same theory: that Momma-pie had insidiously contrived
it. A mantrap had been cunningly set and baited with the perhaps tempting virginity of Aunt Judith - and Uncle Andrew, his mind diverted to
other territory, had obliged by inserting his foot. Maybe so.

Maybe so. If the theory was ever provable - and my father had no
proof- the chance is long gone by now. But a story that Mary Penn told
me, after I had grown up, suggests at least that Uncle Andrew was not
an ecstatic bridegroom. One of Mary's cousins, a schoolmate of Uncle
Andrew's, told her that on the night before his wedding Uncle Andrew
got drunk and fell into a road ditch. His friends gathered around, trying
to help him up.

'Aw, boys," he said, "just leave me be. When I think of what I've got
to lay with tomorrow night, I'd just as soon lay here in this ditch."

He had seen his fate, and named it, and yet accepted it. Why?

However their marriage began, whatever its explanation, their
unlikenesses were profound. The second mystery of their union was set
forth as follows by my mother: "Did your Aunt Judith have so many
health problems because your Uncle Andrew drank and ran around with
other women, or did your Uncle Andrew drink and run around with other women because your Aunt Judith had so many health problems?"
The answer to that question too, assuming that anybody ever knew it,
has been long in the grave.

The question, anyhow, states their condition accurately enough. Aunt
Judith did have a lot of health problems, some of which were very painful. Since no doctor ever found a cause or a remedy for most of them,
it seems that the cause must have been in her mind, which is to say in
her marriage. And perhaps also in her relationship to Momma-pie. My
mother remembers that Aunt Judith never said anything without looking at Momma-pie to see if it was all right. But if Aunt Judith lived in
some fear of Momma-pie, I am sure that she lived also in surprise, bewilderment, and dismay at Uncle Andrew, whom she nevertheless adored.

Sometimes Uncle Andrew could be sympathetic and tender with Aunt
Judith, sorry for her sufferings, worried about her, anxious to help her
solve her problems. Sometimes, unable to meet her demands for attention or sympathy with the required response, he met them instead with
derision. Sometimes, I imagine, he was contrite about his offenses against
her and wished to do better. But as they both surely had learned beyond
unlearning or pretense, the time would invariably come when, under the
spell of an impulse, he would fling her away. He would fling her away as
a flying swallow flings away its shadow.

Aunt Judith always asked you for affection before you could give it.
For that reason she always needed more affection than she got. She would
drain the world of affection, and then, fearing that it had been given only
because she had asked for it, she would have to ask for more.

"Sugah," she would say to whichever of us children had come in sight,
"come here and kiss yo' Aunt Judith!" And she was capable of issuing this
invitation with the broad hint that, because of her frail health, the grave
might claim her before we would have a chance to kiss her again. I am glad
to remember that, in spite of everything, I felt a genuine affection for her,
especially in the time before Uncle Andrew's death -before fate authenticated her predisposition to woe. In those days she could be a pleasant
companion for a small boy, and I remember afternoons when we sat
together while she read to me from the evening paper a reporter's serialized account of the movement of a group of soldiers from training camp
to troopship to battle. We both became deeply interested in those articles
and looked forward to them. I remember how our reading fitted together our interest in the story of the soldiers, our sense of great history unfolding, and our mutual affection and pleasure. And yet when she turned
toward me with her need, as sooner or later she always did, it was hard to
provide a response satisfactory to either of us. It is hard to give the final
kiss of this earthly life over and over again. Mostly I submitted silently to
her hugs, kisses, and other attentions, profiting the best I could from that
exotic smell of cigarette smoke and perfume that hung about her.