False Entry (22 page)

Through the kitchen door I could see almost all the rest of the house: the nearer end of the sitting room, then my door, closed although I kept no concrete secrets behind it, and theirs, closed with the same habit of reserve. They might be here, already behind it, or since it was Friday, not yet returned home from the café. I could knock at the door or wait up for them.

In the sitting room, dimmed with shades both night and day, my aunt’s old parlor suite stood at attention on cabriole legs, its fabric, never renewed, holding the remote look of winter cloth in a warm season, each claw-footed leg clutching its ball. I felt as clenched around the immovable as these. I could not let go of what I meant to let happen. Beneath the periphery of my glance I could see the envelope lying where I had dropped it, on the table next to the canister of tea. Long ago, on the night they left for Memphis, another envelope had lain there. The old canister, years since emptied of its original hoard, had been purged too of that mute twinge of remembrance which it had once held for my mother as well as for me. But I would keep all the fidelities that others seemed almost intent to lose. If I recalled how once she had set out the bit of money, of Twining’s tea for me, I would also counterbalance it; I would tally too how I had wept for her in the privy, with the wry gape of the child who first learns, left behind, that someday he too will want to leave. Over the years I had almost been persuaded to forget this, until that night in Fourchette’s office when, as I sat glass to glass with his son, that poor squeezing-vessel who drank liquor and sweated truth, some inner guardian had risen to remind me that leaving, unless it had its own argument, changed nothing. And straightaway, up like a djinn from a dust heap, an argument, strangely my own, had been provided. I could well marvel now with Demuth over “the mind,” seeing without mysticism its literal power over matter, wreaked daily, ignored and repeated in the perpetual associative hum that tossed up people like analogies, names like truths, truths like shells. To live daily with that marvel, its surprises, even its hurts and horrors, to be logged with a history of my own to interpret, perhaps at the end of life, luckily so far away, to understand—seemed to me all the meaning that one would ever crave. Voicelessly I repeated to myself the new name, signal from that part of myself I meant to preserve.

And still I stood there in the silent house, wondering whether she, they, were behind the door there, at its core. From old habit my muscles motioned me toward the outside, to seek out that accustomed seat with my back against the farthest wall. In another part of my brain a fantasy that I knew to be such slunk back and forth like a ghost hoping to be relieved of its round—the image of myself tearing the envelope across, waiting up to tell them my secret, or bearing it forward through that door, inside.

By an effort of will I kept myself where I was, staring out through the window at the landscape I had lived with for so long. It was moonlit now to a pure absence of color—but in those days, in any case, I rarely saw the colors of the world. The world was black, white or gray in those days, in such tones, one is told, as might be recorded if one could use the eye of an animal as a camera. But one need not go to the animals for such; one need go only to the inner eye of the utterly self-contained. There the world rose for me as always, a backdrop, in its center tonight the dam, clear as a Nuremberg mountain around which my wishes, my judgments flew like angels out of Dürer, in moral striation, untouched by the error of pity, in a wooden perfectibility of wing.

If I had had some mentor to whom I could have said, “Save me from what I shall do!” I might have wavered, but she was the only such mentor I had ever had. I told myself the filial truth that one comes to, that a parent forgets what one is like or has never known it, that whether or not she had a history of her own she was only an actor in mine. I turned from the window and looked at her door. Even if she was behind it, it was closed. So I moved away from her and gave to memory the blame which should have been given to the ancient grudge that antecedes it, to the bias that comes through the archway of birth with us as we are born. So I left the envelope on the table and “did,” as I persuaded myself, “nothing.”

The day came, as none fails to. In answer to a telephone call that my mother, all agog, had made on the eve of it, we had learned that the judge would be busy at other affairs in the morning; we need not present ourselves until the afternoon session. Later I heard her awkwardly trying to coax my uncle; it was never her habit to coax, and the sound of her voice, alternately its stolid self and the tiny voice that some women make when they wheedle, made me blush for her, and against her. She wanted him to take the day off from work and accompany us.

“No, Dora,” I heard him say. “Let it be.” He would by nature of course stiffen away from any public parade of his feelings, but he would be constricted too, I assumed, by that vulgarity of class which held it vulgar to feel. My mother, on the contrary, was in an access of the same delight that moves the grave Jew to get tiddly at his son’s circumcision, that sends the whore to strut austerely a step behind the little daughter who goes before her through the cheap streets, crimped head under cotton Communion veil, on her way to partake for the first time of her Lord.

“And let the boy be,” I heard him add.

I came in just then and joined them at table, wondering if he had any doubts of me, of my conduct tomorrow. I had nothing against him; I was glad that he was not coming.

Although we seldom said grace, I bowed my head as if ready for it to be spoken. Extraordinary, in what detail that last scene, last supper, comes back to me. I see the cloth with its pattern of dulled blue-and-white daisies, a frayed thread hanging from the collar point of the shirt my uncle had just changed to, my mother’s pricked hands and my own, poreless and young—all the stray facts of that room convened now in space as if they had been rubies. Powerless, a god outside the machine, I look down on our three bowed heads from above.

“Just think,” said my mother, glancing from one to the other of us in her fool’s joy, “by this time tomorrow there’ll be two George Higbys!”

She could have said nothing better to show me how gladly she hurried to annul forever my father and all the heritage of that other life, hers too, that went with him; how eager she was to clip the foreskin, veil the eyes, to gain for me—for her own salvation—the great enclosure of the norm.

My uncle gave his cough and did not look at me. Was he less self-deceiving than she? He bent his head over his plate. “Let him be.”

The next morning I woke early, a pulse thudding in my throat, my eyes wide. In that tinder-paper house one could hear every domestic sound, but this was not always an irritant; often I listened gratefully to the chirruped signs of the family unit encamped with me, in whatever bondage, against our mutual wilderness, the world. My uncle, on his way to shave, cleared his throat on the same modest, middling note he made every morning—impossible to say whether he greeted the day or deplored it. My mother could be heard up and about but did not knock as usual to awaken me; did she think, in the generous overflow of last night’s glee, to allow me, as myself, a largesse of dream? Or was she thinking to keep me as safe as possible until that great moment when I should be hatched anew? I could not convince myself that she suspected anything.

Through the window as I dressed, I saw my uncle departing. Seeing him from behind, I noticed for the first time the long, good shape of his head, his fine square posture. I knew well that the latter had nothing to do with this special morning, with me. It was merely that I was seeing him as a passer-by might, instead of at the looming range which makes the intimate invisible. So slight was the silhouette that he made on any nearer awareness, so lacking in the antitheses with which others roughened the vision, that I was surprised to discover, as I watched him recede, how much I respected him. He must have earned it at the rate he did everything, imperceptibly. It came to me too late that through him I could have approached my mother. He would have acceded, and I could have asked him, I did not know why, any more than I knew what had moved him to attach his name to me. As I thought of last night it occurred to me, with the first shiver of interest I had ever felt for him, that of the three of us he might be the least self-deceiving. Perhaps that was all the mystery there was behind a man who seemed to live from modulation to modulation, undisrupted by central song. “Let it be; let him be,” he had said to my mother. And he had bowed his head to hide from her, not from himself, his foreknowledge that there would never be in any real sense two George Higbys.

With that thought I forgot him, turning to regard the cramped room that I was leaving. I should never quite hate it as I meant to hate the rest of Tuscana; it had been mine. As this last morning was mine. My wallet was on the dresser behind me, holding the small remainder of my last week’s earnings. I took it up and was halfway out the window—only three feet from the ground and in an angle concealed from the rest of the house—when by a sudden stricture of the eye I saw the room as it would look, without me, to my mother. This would happen to me often later on, this inner flick that put me without warning in another’s place, and I learned to accept its advent as I might that of an old crony who audited but never advised. I took a bit of paper from the wallet, a pencil from the cleared desk, wrote a line and tossed the note on the pillow:
Back in time.

I could have left her to fears that I would be late or even had decamped, to any number of facets of that anxious doubt she always had of me, that I presumed all mothers had of their children—the formless worry in which she kept disaster warm for me, seeming to hold me already foredoomed. But I was no longer a child, with the simple brutality of a child. She was the first woman I left, as she is for most men, and she herself had taught me that a few ritual comforts left behind could ease the mind of the leaver, that there was a certain neat kindness in which the collapse of trust might be enclosed.

And all that morning I walked about Tuscana, my eyes prying out its ugliness and weaknesses, storing them up to remember. Most of the middle-aged will no longer understand what I intended by this, but some—quite ordinary people, but still joined to their youth by an umbilicus of sensibility, meditation or suffering—will know. Years later, a man told me the story of how he and two friends, on the eve of their graduation from a harsh school that each had mastered but loathed, swore a joint pact that no one of them in times to come would ever refer to his youth as “golden.” In the same way, bathetic and alone on that valedictory morning in Tuscana, I meant never to gloss mine.

Gray to the eye as the town was, calloused with its own desuetude, it was not these physical attributes only whose print I meant to keep. There was another attrition always felt, never phrased, a deep circulatory lack, more of the brain than the heart, that pervaded the land as invisibly as did the shabby-sweet aura of some cheap, anonymous vegetation that I had never learned to identify. If there had once been a land-language here, green or otherwise, it had now been translated into terms of the dams, and Tuscana had been shunted away from these. The vegetation I knew was its people, their faces and voices, the cat’s-cradle patterns of their mornings and evenings, the tenor of their ways projected on their streets.

Therefore, as I walked in and out of these, I observed how, on their slack filth, the ingenuous, lemon coolness of the early day deepened to a dirty yellow, hot and barred as the zoo-pelt of a lion. I noted without charity certain tribal concavities of face often to be found here, narrownesses between eyes, of jaws, a certain reddish-haired skin—never browning in the men and crumpling early in the women—of a fairness almost nasty, as if the very theory of the place had bred this phosphorescence. And as with any grand inquisitor, my step seeded the ground as I walked it, and what I looked for sprang up to be found.

There were three places I turned away from. I did not go down Pridden Street, and I did not follow to its dead end a path that now led nowhere, that once had led to the hill, now entombed, from whose myrtle Johnny and I had looked down. And when I came to the edge of niggertown, I stopped on its border line, remembering my walks there on those fermenting evenings of adolescence—when to be up late, to walk late anywhere is still an act of pride, savage and emancipatory—and how the night music of these people, their nearness, had rested me as well. What I felt about them, then or later, was never egalitarian; I was a neutral here as I was everywhere else. But no one can live near the ghetto without feeling its instruction, even if only as we feel the presence of those orders of nuns who pray for us against our wishes, interceding for us unceasingly with a heaven in which we do not believe. I looked down the lanes at their yard heaps, always reactive, always changing; through the flung doors I smelled the close odors bred of fealty, heard its steady, contralto drone. This was worthy, I told myself, but it was not Tuscana; this was that city of tribulation which is bedouin, which is anywhere, and I turned aside from it and went on.

The town was a small one; in two or three hours I had canvassed it, up one street and down another, and if I found any nook or face that flowered, I ignored them and went on. I had no intentions of justice toward it. No one but the years ahead could inform me that as a man adores or despises what he comes from, so is he invested with grace or malformed.

And when I came home, not stepping in through the window this time, but walking through the front door, I found my mother in that state of apprehension which levitates its harborer above the heads, voices, company of others, making him literally a wire-walker, an
exalté.
She had not found the note; blown by a breeze from the window, it had floated to the floor and lodged under the bed. Kneeling, I saw it, too far back for my arm but not for my eye, lodged in that dim plane of quiet like an old inhabitant. My head felt too heavy for my neck, and for a minute I could have wished to stay there, my eye growing rounder as it had as a child, watching what had escaped the broom to trouble or supply this lilliput country, a penny as big as a table, a dust curl that must be a dune to them, two steel girders of pins. When I got up off my knees I found that she had followed me and was standing there behind me, her hands tranced from her sides. Although it was not yet noon, she was already dressed in her best, with a towel pinned round her waist, and this—the towel and her distraught, faraway manner—put me in mind of the poor girl who had lived downstairs of us in World’s End, a girl either deserted or dreaming of it, who, until she had been taken away, rose each morning, donned the same party satin and spent the day so, a towel always around its gradual soil and her arms a little out from her sides, as if, if she only could keep uncracked the enamel of her preparation, everything would yet come true. My mother’s face, its fixity not for me but above me, had not moved one jot from its neatness, yet seemed blurred. Was I mistaken, was it the weight on my own neck, or had her head taken on an imperceptible tremor? Or was it the nimbus of the terrible heat that mazed us all? I noted, perhaps because I had been noting faces all morning, a blanched flatness above her mouth; who would ever have thought she had so much space there, stiff and white, between her upper lip and nose? Her hands moved toward me in two jerks and her lower teeth came out to worry a puffed place in the upper lip that I had never noticed before, just over the right eyetooth, a small hanging unevenness of the lip line.