False Entry (26 page)

One of the men, the stranger, clearing his throat, mentioned hot applications and spoke again of his father. Just then a neighborhood slattern, a Mrs. Jebb, who had never before been in our house, walked in among us, upborne by the righteous eagerness of those quick to adopt the minor role that disaster allows. When she saw we were all men there, she pushed through us with disdain, stood at the bedside in her fat slippers, then waved us aside. Grouped toward my uncle by her entry, the two men offered him the embarrassed shoptalk of tragedy. “Doc ought to be here soon now … reckon the storm passed us over … heat in that place was terrible … know how the air gets, all tight, before one of those Gulf winds.” One of the men stepped forward.

“Reckon I ought to take this opportunity—name’s Mount, Dabney Mount.” It was not the stranger, who might have, who introduced himself, but the courthouse lounger, the sight of whom, dabbled by the seasons as a park statue is by pigeon dirt, had been silently known to us for years. Generations back, an ancestor had endowed him with a powerful nose that slacker heredities and a single-track diet had perverted at the eyes and the chin, adding the dull roguery of gapped teeth, making of his face a kind of Punch without the intelligence, around its mouth the great, humorous brackets carved by bad feeding, its hatchet shape not entirely guileless of harm.

“Dabney Mount,” he repeated, offering me the serious hush of a man greeting the bereaved. Not a derelict quite, but a man long unused in the ordinary way of things to being in family houses, a life—fed out of paper bags, in no time frame, in flophouse random—that would seek out the public wedding, public funeral where, exhaling its carious, short-order breath, it would find the excitation of kinship almost as satisfying as a sit-down meal. A giggle spurted from him. “Have to give this boy time to recollect which, hey, young fella? Right fancy name you got yourself down there today.”

My uncle heard him with lowered eyes. Excusing himself, he stepped back to listen at the bedroom door, which Mrs. Jebb had half closed.

“Don’t try to raise yourself, honey,” we heard Mrs. Jebb whisper. “That’s it now. There.”

Mount shook his head; his eyelids even pinkened. The stranger—a heavy man with flat white cheeks and an urban taste in linen and haircuts, one of the well-heeled boarders of whom the dam had brought us dozens, family men often, with fringe tastes for the cheap company brought on by their manner of living—cast him a look of disavowal and murmured firmly that they must go, brushing aside my uncle’s brusque thanks. Mount nodded in solemn, side-kick agreement. But my uncle’s terse handshake unnerved him, admitting him so without prejudice to the company of men who by normal process participated in each other daily, jumped to the emergency, rode in the judge’s car, were detailed to carry a sick woman home. It was too much to ask him as well so suddenly to leave the stage.

“Fine woman,” he said, “everybody knows it. Stood up under the judge’s sermon like she felt her business was her own.” His eyes, roving my uncle’s face, seemed at the same time to near each other; his mouth pursed like a valve. Sensing the intent, though not the direction of what was coming, I thought that the circumstance that had removed this man from the center of men might know better than our pity, that there was a force which knew what it was about when it swept him aside from the mainstream. “Stood up under the heat well enough; recollect she wouldn’t even hang on this boy here’s arm. Funny thing—how it was only when the judge gave out the name that it struck her.”

My uncle raised his eyes and looked at me. I avoided them. But I was rescued. I was no longer a nothing.

“Thought of that when I was carrying her,” Mount continued, his pleasure dwelling on that past role. “Thought to myself—the family will want to know that. Case anything happens, the family will want to know it looked like she repented just before she was struck down.” His tongue protruded slowly from his lips, and his companion moved away from him with an indefinable grimace. It extruded like a tongue from an anus, a dirty reminder of the sore red tissue of which we all were made.

“She had nothing to repent,” said my uncle, flanking him toward the door the way a broom urges over the threshold a piece of ordure that ought not to be touched. “And now get out, man. One job doesn’t excuse the other.”

But to Mr. Mount, moved to hysteria by sudden affinity with his kind, this was yet another reminder. “Got your mind on jobs, hey, after this morning, and shouldn’t wonder—heard the news about it at Semple’s this noon.” He fumbled in a crevice in his clothing, took out the smallest size paper bag, from which he extracted the pinched half of a cigar, and inserted this in the wet, restless round under his nose. “Tip you off—crowd down there ain’t too sweet on you, sum totally. Happens I’m sponsoring this gentleman there this evening. Glad to do the same for you any time.” It was the remnant nose, after all, that made for travesty. Watching that bleared cockscomb above what crowed beneath, I understood how a flock might peck to death one of its kind—because he was.

“Come along,” said the stranger. “This gentleman has no time for that now.”

“Coming.” Mount made a jaunty half-salute with the hand that held the cigar. He winked. “Promised I’d take him to Semple’s by way of the Three Sisters.” The other hand cradled the near elbow of the stranger, who this time seemed unable to flinch from it.

Behind us, Mrs. Jebb came out, finger to lips. “Maybe she’ll drop off, now, you all be quiet.”

“Tuh, Jesus!” Mount bent almost double, pantomiming his remorse over forgetting about noise. He was almost over the threshold now, but again he halted, blinking his scanty lashes. Perhaps he felt our triple enmity, triple disgust radiating toward him, accepting it as the return of that element in which he normally moved. His hand moved to my shoulder.

“You recollect it, don’t you though, young fella. Tell ’em how it was the way I said it was. Wasn’t till the very moment the judge give out the new name, skips my mind what it is. But it was right then and there that your mamma fell down.” His hand, with its sickening, ancient slug-smell, nudged me, pleading. I could not flinch under it either. What I had done, what the stranger would do, linked us to it.

My uncle’s clear, sandy glance took us both in; there was no telling what it had received. At the moment, as the stranger had said, he had no time for us. He turned to Mrs. Jebb, sleazy concierge of the bedside, for any message she might have. And as he did so, the doctor arrived.

She had had a stroke, though a light one; the history of such cases was that all her faculties, but slightly impeded now, would return. It was true also, to be sure, that the same history predicted the return, far ahead but inevitable, of another and another of death’s strokings until the final one—each to be preceded by the visible spasm peculiar to such cases, that strumming whose end appearance was muscular but undoubtedly began hours or days before in the great banyan trunks of the nerves. And this in itself was encouraging, since these very symptoms, always premonitory, when once felt by a patient were henceforth unmistakable and with prompt medication could be controlled, postponed time and time again before they reached their ultimate—although of course the real ultimate could never be postponed. But was not this latter, said the doctor’s bonhomie, the same sentence as lay in wait for all of us? Mrs. Higby’s case was no different from the rest of us, except perhaps in that she had been given an insight—always alarming at first but soon tolerable—into the special terms under which she might expect the tap that comes for us all. Merely a warning, an inkling of the kind of death he would pick for himself had he the choice of one; here followed a light listing of the morning’s pitiables, although how he had consoled these gangrenous amputees, terminal cancers, was not revealed. As to the time limit, let her not think of it—time enough, like the rest of us, to be in an automobile accident or have a flowerpot fall on her head. Years of it. Years and years.

After he had gone, his sentences burned curatively behind him, and through the crack of the doorjamb at which I had been listening, the sickroom glowed in the spiritual blue shed by the one lamp, around which Mrs. Jebb, before leaving, had pinned a twist of the paper from a roll of surgical cotton. It was an aniline light I recalled from the sickrooms of childhood, falsely peaceful and removed, on the edge of nightmare. In its coal-gleam shadow my mother, raised on pillows, her braided hair on her shoulders, appeared freakishly young, a dwarf-woman with the lined face of a pseudo child. The sedative given her had not yet taken effect. Eyes brooding past the horizon of the room, hands upcurled on the coverlet, she lay immured on the raft of her bed like those women whom one glimpsed from the hospital corridor at visiting hour, women cleansed for exhibit, from whom the drama of illness had been taken—Mrs. Jebb had even bound ribbon in her braids.

“What are you mooning there for, lad, she’s going to be fine. No need to pussyfoot behind doors!” My uncle, returning from “just a few words” outside with the departing doctor, had brought back some of the latter’s manner with him—he had never in his life called me “lad.” Genially he dragged me forward to the bedside; she raised her drowsing eyes; I looked down. The glance we had exchanged on the courthouse steps was equal—this was also. It was a glance from which each of us tried to break away, to which each returned. My arms, heavy as if they still had her weight on them, hung at my sides. And she looked away and back again, as the mother does who, never having held her child free of foreboding, now has that nameless worry confirmed. Who can tell how all this begins between those equilibrists fated to each other, parents and children? I never see them together at a playground but I think of it, watching the child, always at least one, of whom ill is already subtly expected, who can but grow up to fulfil what is asked of him, by and by. She tried to speak now, straining until the neck cords showed, her lips stiff and parted, but only a gurgle escaped them.

“Don’t! Don’t do that, Dora, don’t try. You heard what he said just now. It will come back to you.” My uncle stood by the side of the bed. “It’s something you want, isn’t it?” She nodded, rolled her head from side to side. “I tell you what—close your eyes.” She had already closed them, but her face lacked the sweet, open nudity of faces in repose; the twisted mouth guarded it, satirizing my uncle, his game. I tried to slip out of the room, but he held me fast with his hard hand on my wrist, and again this broke the usual form between us, for always he had been careful to be the uncle, the stepfather; he had never laid a hand on me, never touched me before. “No,” he said, “you might guess it quicker than I.”

He began his litany—was it food, warmth or drink she wanted, was it the bedpan? One by one he enumerated the bread-and-meat facts of a household, of an illness, of existence, and as he uttered them with bowed head a poetry issued about them, from this man whom I had once compared to a myna bird talking. One by one he dealt with them—animal, vegetable, mineral—in a voice whose justness I had never seen to be tenderness, under whose careful phlegm I had never suspected the ultimate poise. I remembered now how one might see him at the mill, his head inclined as if he were listening to certain multiples, his hand going out to, never touching, the looms. Was it the wireless? He could put it on the nighttable. Was it the household? He could provision it and as she well knew there was enough money. If it was the clients, he would phone them. Was it the stained dress? He would put it to soak. He had already thought of how she might manage tea—there was one of those bent glass tubes she might drink from. One recalled then how many years he had lived with another invalid, but he had never been like this with my aunt. There seemed no corner of my mother’s needs, of her longings that he did not anticipate, con over again in that dry voice so willing to run for them—the drink, the blanket, the pillow—that uttered them like endearments, as if he said
darling darling darling
out loud in the increasing shadows of the room. Animal, vegetable, mineral. But above that mocking lip-seam, her eyes remained closed. The voice faltered, failed. “Not—not the pan?”

All that time through that listing, that lesson, his hard fingers, unconsciously clasping, had nursed mine. And I had no response I could make, except to guide them to the one circle of her needs he stood outside of, had forgotten.

“Ask her,” I said, “if it is something about me.” And before he could ask her, the lids flew open, her eyes stared.

He dropped my arm. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Will you ask her then?”

“Let me go,” I said low. “Let me go.”

On the pillow the gurgling began again, the head tolling from side to side.

“Don’t! Don’t!” cried my uncle, almost shouting. “Let me see, let me see,” he said, muting his voice. “Perhaps a pencil, no, you couldn’t manage it, could you.” He nursed her hand as he had mine, bent his lips to it absently. “Wait,” he said, “I have it.” He sat on the side of the bed. “Hold on.” He took a pencil and a bit of paper from his breast pocket, reached for a book that always lay on the night table—the pocket Bible given my mother by her father when she went to France. Resting the paper on this, he took my mother’s left hand, placed it against his. “You know how the deaf-and-dumb talk to each other,” he said. “With their fingers. You do it that way, eh? Trace the letters one at a time, in my hand. And I’ll write each down. And show it you as I do.”

That was the way her rage fell upon me, not as I had envisioned it—(never as one envisions it)—transcribed silently from her hand to his to the paper, while I cringed, stiffened, remained. Regret is not wild. It is a silence hung between two masks, in which we lay our foreheads first against one, against the other, knowing that if given the magic return to the moment before choice, we must choose as before.

My uncle finished, read what he had transcribed. The paper crumpled slowly in his hand. “Then … what that nasty …” He got up from the bedside and led me from the room, closing the door behind him. We stood in the hallway, hearing each other’s breath in a savage mingling that all the years of to-and-fro in that narrow passage, narrow house had not achieved. Over his shoulder, the sitting room, not three feet away from us, the bottle on its table, the clenched chairs, appeared like the distant edge of the civilized world.