False Entry (27 page)

“What have you done?” he said. “Back there in court. What can you have done to her?” He reached upward, in back of him, but only to turn on the hall bulb. Its glare made us blink, a light in limbo, that no one had ever bothered to shade. Did I hope, in the moment while his arm went up, that he meant to strike me? I know that I moved closer, not away.

On the floor between us lay the dropped paper. I touched it with my shoe.

“Never mind that. Answer me!”

“I took another name. But—not yours.”

“You took—”

I nodded.

“And without her?”

Yes.

“How did you manage it?”

I told him.

He swore, so far under his breath that I could not hear the words, although I thought I caught one—“town.” After that he was silent for a moment. Neither of us moved. “She should have known,” he said then. “She should have known.”

“What?”

He raised his head. “You.”

Does he not see then, I thought? Even now? That if what happened to her befell her because of me—it is because she
knows
me? He is blind, I thought, staring into his eyes, and there is no need to tell him.

“I should have told her,” he said. “That it could never be.”

Timidly, for the first time, I touched his arm, perhaps because one did not needlessly hurt the blind. And perhaps not. “I did not do it—against you.”

He did not shrink from me. But I found that when one tells the truth out of pity, that is often the way one gets it back.

“You poor … poor …” he said. And because he said it without patronage, in a quiet marvel over all of us, I could feel that I was. I know now that he was a man from whom, if ever he had touched me, I would have learned; if ever he had spoken, I would have heard. And I know now why he moved so carefully, spoke so seldom. He was a man so undeceived about others that he could say little that would not hurt or repel them, who in his own life dared move only from modulation to modulation because he had so little self-deception on which to depend. But that clear inner eye from which he suffered was not, as Fourchette’s was, disengaged. For all his outer evenness he was still immersed in the current, still mortally capable of pain, and of more.

“What did you think, then?” he said roughly. “Did you think I thought I could get a son by letting her scribble my name down for him? I did it for her!” Then he struck his fist against his forehead, a single blow, not distracted, almost grave, that might have been anything, a reproof for forgetting her now or the sharp “to heel” of a man returning himself to himself; and pushing me aside, he went into the bedroom again and shut the door.

I picked up the paper from the floor and held it, still crumpled, in my hand. What more could it teach me that I had not already learned? I had not even thought to impute that—that he did it for her.

Just then the door, ill-hung, ill-fitted like every part of that house, swung silently wide as was its habit to swing, back and forth in the draft from the passage, unless it had been latched. Raised on her pillows, my mother faced me. She was still awake; her eyes gleamed in the light cast from behind me; to her I must have appeared as the men on the street had that afternoon with the sun behind them—a dark face with a bright nimbus of hair. My uncle was oblivious; he was kneeling at the side of the bed with his back to me, one arm flung across her knees.

“He did it against me,” he was saying. “Not you. He did it against me.”

Lying there under the blue lamp, she said nothing, made no move. He would not know why she could never believe him—he was childless. But she would know that I did what the child must do—hunt for the quick of the parent, and pierce there.

“Please believe it,” he said. “He did it against me.”

He does this for her too, I thought. How chary I have been to admit it—the real motive. But this, that he tells her now, she surely cannot believe.

Then, as I watched them, as the door inched slowly toward me in its reverse arc, her arm came up around him. I saw her head nod, not in sleep, her eyes close and reopen, and still nodding, she held him, kneading his bowed shoulders with her good left hand. The door came between us like a curtain, leaving me outside it, outside them. Once more I had forgotten to impute the motive of love.

Three days later, on the evening of the third day, I left Tuscana. I had no need to spend the intervening hours in arrangements. My effects were few and I had always planned to take less; I was going where abundance was. In a great city, personality itself is to be had for the making; this is the deep, real reason that carries a clever provincial there. And in my summertime dreams of my arrival there—fantasies bred while I worked at the market, never seeing the hawker’s colors of that evening bourse already undergoing its own fatal change—I saw myself arriving in a dawn whose steel-flushed outlines and avenues I had already studied, saw myself facing that chemically rising light with nothing but the brain that had got me there. I could have wished to have awakened like a foundling on one of its paving stones, naked even of swaddling clothes, or to have rubbed my eyes open to those complex rays like some gay stripling who has slept all night in a doorway, and now finds himself hungry, powerful and healthily amnesiac, remembering only his name. Now, instead, I found myself in a strange preamble of nakedness, under edict in Tuscana, here.

The words on the piece of paper had been these: I
want him away. Tell him I do not hold it against him. But I want him away.
Nothing further was said, nor was the paper itself mentioned by my uncle again. The paper had vanished; he seemed to assume that I had seen it, that I would do the right thing—and that I would know what the right thing was. Only in retrospect does the simplicity of that last seem extravagant. For I did know.

I knew that my mother wanted me to leave at once, and without seeing her, without her having to see me again. One learns from the hurt one inflicts as well as from the hurt one suffers—this is a lesson elided in the popular self-help primers of love. And at my mother’s bedside I had learned that it is not the victim in us that needs to turn away.

My uncle, when I told him I was leaving, said little. At first he merely registered a cough—that dry, aphysical trade-mark of a man who collected neither crotchets nor colds—a cough without ponder, a mere punctuation. I think now of how long I lived with it, despising it as the tic of an inner aridity—that sound which instead marked time for him while he chose from his heavy store of honesty the least gnomic reply, the answer that would least trouble others with the weight of themselves.

“Best,” he said then, “best for all of us.” And then, before he had time to warn himself, cough again quickly: “I knew you would know to do that.”

This was the first he had addressed me since our exchange in the hall. “She should have known,” he had said then, and now—“I knew.” His blunt expectation, even at this late date, of the best from me, was something new and astringent, masculine, making me suspect what I might have lost by having been reared by women. How strangely he was making me feel, with his assumptions—was it he or I who had changed? Confused, I waited for more. I did not ask him, as I ask myself now, how he knew.

But he required, gave, nothing further. Thereafter, while he absented himself from the mill until a nurse should be found, and spent all his hours with my mother, I was left to my vacuum. Except for the fact of going, I was already gone, disposed of as the consciousness must of necessity do with those, good or bad, who are about to be removed from our sufficiently complicated scene. There was no malice here; it was character—of the twenty-twenty-visioned eye that, strive as it may not to make a show of anticipating the purblind, cannot always keep from anticipating itself. It was the perfect ostracism, one that did not even turn aside. And the perfect punishment—for which others are never more than agents—the nudge, not of dogma, but of life. I had wished for freedom from all ties; now I was left to find out what that freedom was.

Friday had been the day in court, Saturday the day I had told him my decision too late for the schedule; Sunday there were only local trains. I would leave on Monday evening—a short interim, but more than enough time to explore the vacuum that has no clock. I often think of that solitary bout—it was my first. It was my first step into the sinkhole of identity. Every man, even the most coherent, the strongest, has moments when his foot sinks suddenly in that abyss—a voice asking, “Who am I?” To which echo answers, “Am I?” Loneliness is a mere wavelet on that surface, a kitchenmaid’s word for a crater whose term of definition, if there is one, must lie among the philosophical—perhaps some black neologism that compounds them all. For these are moments that come by seeming vagary, uncoupled with ordinary loss. Ordinary misery—loss of a woman, of a child, of a friend in war, of any appendage of the heart or the body—is no vacuum. The sundered body is a bowl that fills with dark. But in the vacuum one comes,
pas seul
, to that farther edge of ego where, if one does not whirl away quickly in some
pas de deux
of activity, one might feel what only the dying should feel—the loss of loss.

As everyone must, I was to find my own ways of dealing with this; under the aspect of eternity all methods are no doubt equally absurd. But at that time I had none. Three feet away from me was the edge of the civilized world, but as far from my grasp as the far shore in a binocular lens. Meanwhile, flowers came for my mother from Miss Pridden; some of them had time to fade. In my room I had already had for some days now Demuth’s parting gift, parting shot, never to be acknowledged, a German grammar on whose flyleaf “
Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit
” had been elaborately inscribed. “Perhaps someday you will be glad to remember this.” What I remembered instead when I saw it was that other tag, truism from the
Schwäbisch
of his fathers, that other untranslatable, all-translatable sheep’s bawl. But that too came from a distant shore. I had meant to rise hand over hand on the single rope of myself; now, without the asseveration of others, the rope disappeared. And meanwhile my uncle passed and repassed me in the hall.

On Monday evening he drove me to the train with my parcel of books, my one bag. I had expected to walk; his offer came to me as a surprise, a rescue. It was again one of the long dusks, the air cotton-warm and clogged, but I felt the wonderful, cool renewal of doing, as if I had been ticking away under a bell glass that now was removed. The traveler is crisp with organization, his very flesh hardens forward; to his futurist eye those who are staying on behind seem soft and idle in their lack of schedule, safely placed folk but fainthearted, already receding. Seated beside me in the car, my uncle as he drove looked so to me.

At the main-line stop, although we were well ahead of time, the red signal was already blinking. The old huddle of sheds and lean-to’s, once piled against each other like domino counters, had long since been cleared away, leaving the ancient ticket office with its iron-rib-banded eaves, although one still had to buy one’s ticket elsewhere. There was no platform; we would still have to cross to the track from the cindery siding on which a few other travelers were already standing, well back from the huge rush of air that would come with the train. The train stopped regularly now; there were eighteen thousand people in Charlotte and Denoyeville, and more coming. But Tuscana still had the main line.

A light summer rain began falling, welcome on the cheek, smelling of the reviving grass. Here and there a traveler lifted his face to it, regarded the sky and spoke of the night, that after such a rain might be clear. Voices were single in note but joined in portent, as they are in the open air and when speaking of weather. A bit of crushed bird’s egg lay pale green in the cinders near my shoe, and I felt the foolish softness, weak happiness of someone long housebound who is admitted again to the range of the seasons, under whose passing in his absence people have maintained themselves like sturdy blooms. From a distance a man wearing a hat and carrying a briefcase waved to my uncle, who nodded back, fumbling at his collar. He had lost formality, even neatness, in his nursing; he had come out without a tie, and his shirt collar was soiled. Between its limp tips his throat seemed newly meager, and the underline of the chin descended in that aging tautness so particularly human when, as with my uncle, the jawbone kept its youth. Far off, communicated not yet through the ground or any shimmer in the air, but in the hardening curve of the group waiting, we sensed the oncoming train.

My uncle took out his watch. “Four minutes yet.” He held the watch overlong, warmed it in his hand, hesitated, ran his thumb over the chain, before he slipped it back in his vest pocket. Sometimes I fancy now that he meant to give it to me, tried to, failed. “We’d have had time for a short one,” he said. “For luck. I had the bottle out … but I forgot it.” Forgetting that Mrs. Jebb had come over to stay in the house while we were gone, he had run back, just as we were leaving, to answer the tinkle of my mother’s bell. “Well … God bless,” he said, and gave me his hand.

“When we came home that day—” I said. “You were home before your time, before us. And you had the bottle out that day.” It was never out, as we both knew, except for celebration.

“Ah … yes.” Although the track was still quiet, his answer was almost inaudible. “You will not have heard.” Red tinged his cheek. “Blankenship has stepped down.”

The train shuddered in then. We fell back in the smacked air. He is head foreman then at last, I thought, as I lugged my bag up the iron steps to the coach car. I remembered the bottle and pushed-back chair in the sitting-room window, on my aunt’s table the whisky’s slopped ring. Blankenship has stepped down. He had had it ready to greet her with when we greeted him with her. I turned to catch sight of him at the window and found him behind me. He had followed me into the car.

“She will want news of you,” he said hurriedly.

I nodded without speaking.

“She will want to write to you … after a while. But at first, you understand, I shall have to do it for her.” He coughed. “Tell me then—under what name?”