Lilith (50 page)
How have I endured? By what premises and through what undertakings, since Lilith’s death, have I earned the will, the strength and the privilege to exist? Only by these: by restoring the devotion which had existed between my grandfather and myself, and by the writing of this book. I could wish that they were more than two in number and more expressly sacrificial in nature; and yet, men who have the fortune to work out their salvation have few pretensions in the matter. I can say that I am alive and sane with the knowledge that to list these as achievements would speak little for one’s humility or the quality of one’s contrition, unless one had experienced despair.
There was a time when I was greatly inclined toward some directly religious method of redemption—through prayer, or meditation, or service in some holy order; but having neither a monastic nor a truly contemplative nature, I must have foreseen, I think, the futility of such a measure on my part. For a long time—almost a year—I could do nothing. I used to wander about the streets of our town in a stupor of grief, peering into shop windows, loitering in alleys, sitting for hours on the Lodge veranda or musing on the courthouse lawn, across the street from the statue of the Confederate soldier. These last two localities were, during this period, the poles between which my life—if it can be called such—seemed to alternate. From my long reveries on the veranda I would drift down through the evening streets to the courthouse lawn, to stare with a kind of slowly growing, inarticulate agony at the sculptured bronze-and-granite fortitude of the shabby Rebel soldier.
One evening while I sat staring at it from the retaining wall my grandfather crossed the main street to the narrow island on which it stood and paused for a moment directly beneath the statue, waiting for the traffic to subside before he proceeded across the intervening pavement. As he did so the shadow of the soldier fell across his figure in the low evening light and fitted him so exactly that I felt my heart—I do not know how else to say it—awaken. There was something so miraculously picturesque in the way their two forms coincided—the shadow of the slouch hat matching so precisely his own frayed Panama, the empty scabbard extending at the identical angle as the Malacca cane which he held thrust beneath his arm, his foot placed forward to the curb in the same indomitable attitude as that of the booted infantryman above him—that I seemed at last to recognize him, to see revealed some long unrequited aspect of his own tattered humanity; and my heart cried out to him.
That evening after dinner I went into the parlor where he invariably sat waiting for my grandmother to join him, an unread newspaper lying folded in his lap and his clasped hands resting heavily upon it, tapping together the tips of his thumbs while he stared sightlessly across the room. I asked if he would like to play a game of cribbage. He looked at me in a startled, somewhat suspicious way and said hesitantly, “Why, I don’t know . . . well, yes, I would, Lad. It’s such a long time . . . I don’t know how well I’ll play. But yes, I’d like to very much.”
It was in this way—not so much through any calculated course of redemption on my part as by the augury of that image of my grandfather, clothed in heroic shadow—that I began the slow and painful but quietly joyful task of restoring to the old man the love and self-respect which I had so long denied him. I cannot help believing that there
was
augury in it—that I was by this means led to see how sovereign for me were the responsibility and privilege of redeeming the single human situation to which my initiative and faith were indispensable. It was more difficult than might be imagined, for we had been long alienated, and in spite of our mutual wish to recover the relationship we once had shared, we had grown to resent and suspect each other in many things. There was, as well, in all of our approaches toward each other, a painful, confessional quality of abasement (for we both were guilty) and the sorrowful bitterness which exists between proud and sentimental people in such circumstances. Yet, through unyielding perseverance and by small means and great, I managed to renew in him, over the years, the conviction of my love and respect which has permitted him to live out his years in peace and dignity.
Perhaps my most productive measure was the offer I made, a few months later, to work with him at the tavern. I have never known exactly what my grandfather’s opinion was regarding my resignation from the Lodge. My distress must have been evident to him, and he cannot have failed to draw conclusions from it; yet never once, during the long period of my indigence, did he question me or make a comment of the least direct kind upon it. Whether this was through tact or by reason of our growing estrangement, I do not know; but I am inclined to believe that it was, rather, from fear that I would leave home. I think he was always afraid that I would desert him, as my father had done, and abandon him and my grandmother to a bitter, childless age, each dreading the other’s death and the utter loneliness that would follow it. I am supported in this conviction by the memory of his face when I asked him, during one of the regular evening cribbage games which we had by this time reinstituted, if he thought there might be a place for me at the restaurant. I was on the point of repeating the question—for he sat so still, staring at his cards as if absorbed completely in the play, that I thought he had not heard me—when he raised his head slowly, his face filled with an expression of such profound and long-unfelt joy that it gave to his eyes and features the effect, almost, of resurrection.
“Why, Lad, there is always a place for you, if you want it,” he said; and after a considerable pause he added softly, “I never realized—I always thought you had such a distaste for the work, Sonny.”
“I used to, I guess,” I said. “But I used to have all kinds of false pride.”
He lowered his head again and paused a moment further, shifting and studying the cards in his hand before saying humbly, “Well, I guess you come by that honestly enough, Lad.”
From that time onward, with slowly dissipating embarrassment and slowly growing pride, we walked to work together every morning through the coolly stirring streets to the old tavern at the outskirts of the town, where I applied myself with grateful resolution to learning the trade he had so laboriously established and which, one day, he had so fervently anticipated bequeathing to his own flesh. I did have, indeed, a distaste for the business—the kitchen, with its smells of blood and boiling food and its huge hanging quarters of dismembered meat, often used to make me reel with nausea—but this I welcomed, for it gave at least a semblance of penance to my labor and saved me from a suspicion of felicity in it. As he grew older I took over a greater and greater share of his responsibilities, until, after several years, he gratefully relinquished them entirely and, except for an occasional bustling and cheerful visit, took to spending his days at home with my grandmother, exchanging idle, ruminative conversation with her on the front porch, playing chess by correspondence and, in fine weather, tending an herb garden in which he took great pride. After her death, which occurred about five years ago, the emptiness of the house oppressed him, and he began again accompanying me to the tavern in the mornings, as he still does. He is a very old man now, and sits most of the day among the gleam of his copper scullery-ware in an old black leather armchair which I have had placed for him in a warm corner of the kitchen, from where he watches the activity with comfortable vigilance, drowsing occasionally, waking at noon to eat a cracker and a bowl of warm soup, looking forward with patient content to our slow walk home together through the dark streets and our evening cup of tea and game of cribbage. I suppose I shall continue keeping the tavern when he dies, as I know he wishes me to. I shall never marry.
If by devoting myself in this way to my grandfather I have managed largely to endure, I owe as much, if not more, I think, to the other thing which I have mentioned: the writing of this book. How I first conceived of such an undertaking I cannot remember; perhaps it originated as a barely conscious impulse to confess. If so, it is one that grew in intensity and complexity over the years until it became a passion (whether moral or aesthetic I do not know, and I feel I have relinquished the right to an opinion as to how far the two may be analogous). I know only that I came to realize that I should never rest until I had created something formal, some shapen thing, from my experience. To this end I read incessantly. Outside of my work and my attentions to my grandfather, it became my single occupation, my single diversion, my single consolation. I must, in a dozen years, have read five hundred books, studying their manner and their matter with equal assiduity. Through volumes of theology, science, philosophy and fiction I worked my indefatigable, often exalted, often chastened way, searching out whatever wisdom and comfort I had the wit to discover in them and applying myself to those elements of composition only by means of which can literate records of experience be made. If there was little penalty in this for me, there was much in its application; for the writing of this book has been far from an easy or a comfortable task—indeed, there have been times when, if to renege in it had not threatened me with far more critical discomfort, I do not know if I should have found the courage to persist. Yet, it is written at last; and in completing it, have I found the peace that I anticipated? I have come as close to it, I think, as I am ever likely to again. This is not to say that I confuse peace of so humble a degree with virtue or fulfillment, or that I believe my repentance to be perfect, for it can never be. And yet I exist; for along with many lesser vanities, I have lost the hunger for perfection.
