The Outsider (5 page)

His hand touched the doorknob and the telephone shrilled. Now, who in hell could that be? Was it Dot? Or Gladys? He turned the doorknob and the telephone rang again. Hell! Anger flashed through him at some vague someone who was trying to snatch him from his futile wrestling with his problem, trying to pry him loose from the only thing that made his life possess meaning even though it made him suffer. Impatiently he picked up the receiver.

“Cross? Is that you?” It was his mother's quavering, high-pitched voice singing uncertainly over the wire.

“How are you, Ma?”

“Fine, Cross, I reckon,” she said querulously, like those who are over sixty and who feel uncommonly well but are too superstitious to admit it. “Can I see you, Cross? Sometime today…?”

He bridled, trying to slap away the clutch of his mother's wrinkled hand as it reached invisibly for him.

“Anything wrong, Ma?”

“I want to see you,” she said, evading his question.

His teeth clamped; he did not want to see her, certainly not now with this mood of bleak dread in him.

“Ma, I'm trying to sleep,” he lied, speaking reprovingly.

Silence. He felt he had hurt her and he grew angry. He waited for her to speak further, but only the metallic hum of the line came to his ear.

“Ma,” he called softly. “You're still there?”

“Yes, Cross.” A note of firm patience in her voice frightened him.

“What is it, Ma? I work nights and I've got to get some rest.”

Again silence.

“Is it about money?” he asked, trying to hasten it.

Another silence; then his mother's voice came clearly: “Cross, that Dot girl was just by here to see me…”

Her tone, charged and precise, was filled with a multitude of accusations that evoked a vast, hot void in him. His mother was still talking, but he did not hear her. His eyes darted like those of a bayed animal. Oh, God!
Why had Dot done that?
He had not kept his promise to see her this morning and she had gotten into a panic; that was it. But she had sworn to consult him before acting on her own, and now…His life was a delicate bridge spanning a gaping chasm and hostile hands were heaping heavy loads upon that bridge and it was about to crack and crash downward.

“What did you say, Ma?” He pretended that he had not heard.

How much did she know? Perhaps everything! That crazy Dot! He could wring her neck for this! She had no right to tell tales to his mother! Women had no sense of…

“You
know
what I'm talking about, boy,” his mother scolded him sternly. “That girl's in trouble—”

“
Who
are you talking about, Ma?” He still stalled for time.

“Stop acting foolish, Cross! That girl's blaming
you—
”

“Blaming me for what?” he asked. He knew that he was acting silly, but he could not easily change his attitude now.

“She's in a family way, Cross,” his mother spoke boldly, a woman lodging woman's ancient complaint against man. “And she says it's
you
! She's worried sick.
She had to talk to somebody, so she came to me. Son, what have you done?” There came the sound of a sob being choked back. “You're married. You've three children. What're you going to do?”

“Just a sec. Somebody's at the door,” he lied for respite.

Like always, he had doubled his burdens; he heard his mother's tirades and at the same time he pretended that he was not reacting to them, and this dual set of responses made him frantic. That harebrained Dot! Trying to save herself and ruining me, the only one who can save her…Dot's panic had made her deal him a dirty blow. He brought the receiver to his mouth.

“Is she still there, Ma?” His tone of voice confessed that he now knew what it was all about.

“Hunh? No; she's gone,” his mother said. “She's gone to see Gladys…Cross, that girl's young, a child. She can get you into serious trouble…”

Dot was talking to his wife! This was the end! The void in him grew hotter. A widening circle of people were becoming acquainted with his difficulties. He knew that Gladys would do her damndest now; she would be merciless. Her knowing about Dot would redouble her hate for him. She would bare the details of his private blunderings before the domestic courts…He had to try to stop her. But could he? Maybe it was already too late?

“I'll be right over,” he said, hanging up abruptly.

He took another drink and went out of the door. As he descended the stairs, his mother's scolding intensified his mood of self-loathing, a mood that had been his longer than he could recall, a mood that had been growing deeper with the increasing complexity of the events of his life. He knew himself too well not to realize the meaning of what he was feeling; yet his self-knowledge,
born of a habit of incessant reflection, did not enable him to escape the morass in which his feelings were bogged. His insight merely augmented his emotional conflicts. He was aware, intimately and bitterly, that his dread had been his mother's first fateful gift to him. He had been born of her not only physically but emotionally too. The only psychological difference between them was that he was aware of having received this dark gift from her at a time when he was too young to reject it, and she had given it to him in a period of her life when her intense grief over the death of her husband had rendered her incapable of realizing the full import of what she had been doing. And he could never speak to her about this difference in emotional similarity; he could only pretend that it did not exist, for not only did his deep love of her forbid it, but he did not possess enough emotional detachment from her for that to happen. As her son, he was much too far from her and at the same time much too close, much too warm toward her and much too cold. To keep her life from crushing his own, he had slain the sense of her in his heart and at the same time had clung frantically to his memory of that sense. His feelings for her were widely distant: flight and embrace…

From the vestibule he stepped into a frozen world lit by a lemon-colored sun whose glare sparkled on mounds of ice. The snow had stopped and the sky stretched pale and blue; the air was dry and bitter cold. The sun disclosed in sharp detail the red brick buildings, glinted on the slow moving trolleys, and cast into the windowpanes liquid reflections that stung his eyes. His shoulders hunched forward and he shivered and clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering, his breath steaming against the freezing air.

He was conscious of himself as a frail object which
had to protect itself against a pending threat of annihilation. This frigid world was suggestively like the one which his mother, without her having known it, had created for him to live in when he had been a child. Though she had loved him, she had tainted his budding feelings with a fierce devotion born of her fear of a life that had baffled and wounded her. His first coherent memories had condensed themselves into an image of a young woman whose hysterically loving presence had made his imagination conscious of an invisible God—Whose secret grace granted him life—hovering oppressively in space above him. His adolescent fantasies had symbolically telescoped this God into an awful face shaped in the form of a huge and crushing NO, a terrifying face which had, for a reason he could never learn, created him, had given him a part of Himself, and yet had threateningly demanded that he vigilantly deny another part of himself which He too had paradoxically given him. This God's NO-FACE had evoked in his pliable boy's body an aching sense of pleasure by admonishing him to shun pleasure as the tempting doorway opening blackly on to hell; had too early awakened in him a sharp sense of sex by thunderingly denouncing sex as the sin leading to eternal damnation; had posited in him an unbridled hunger for the sensual by branding all sensuality as the monstrous death from which there was no resurrection; had made him instinctively choose to love himself over and against all others because he felt himself menaced by a mysterious God Whose love seemed somehow like hate. Mother love had cleaved him in twain: a wayward sensibility that distrusted itself, a consciousness that was conscious of itself. Despite this, his sensibilities had not been repressed by God's fearful negations as represented by his mother; indeed, his sense of life had been so heightened that desire
boiled in him to a degree that made him afraid. Afraid of what? Nothing exactly, precisely…And this constituted his sense of dread.

As he neared his mother's rooming house, he could already feel the form of her indictment, could divine the morally charged words she would hurl at him. And he knew that his reaction would be one of sullen and guilty anger. Why, then, was he going to see her? Because he really wanted her to rail at him, denounce him, and he would suffer, feel his hurt again, and, in doing so, would know intuitively that somewhere in the depths of his raw wound lay the blood of his salvation or the pus of his disaster. This obscure knowledge had stayed his finger on the trigger of the gun whose barrel had touched his temple this morning…

He entered a dilapidated building, went down a dark hallway and tapped upon a door. Sounds of muffled movement came to him; the door opened and framed his mother's solemnly lined face, the white hair pulled severely back from a wide forehead, a gnarled right hand holding a woolen shawl about stooped shoulders. Her mouth was a tight, flat slit and her eyes peered through cloudy spectacles.

“Hi, Ma.”

Without answering, she widened the door and he walked past her into a tiny, shabby room that smelt of a sweetish odor of decaying flesh that seemed to cling to the aged who are slowly dying while still living.

He noticed, as he did each time he visited her, that she appeared to have shrunken a bit more; and he knew that it was her chronic fretting, her always tearing at her emotions that was whitening the hairs of her head, deepening the lines in her face, and accentuating the stoop of her back. His mother could no more relax than he could. Like me, she's using up herself too fast, and
she's just a little over sixty…If she cared for herself more, judged life less severely, time would deal easier with her…Why were some people fated, like Job, to live a never-ending debate between themselves and their sense of what they believed life should be? Why did some hearts feel insulted at being alive, humiliated at the terms of existence? It was as though one felt that one had been promised something and when that promise had not been kept, one felt a sense of loss that made life intolerable; it was as though one was angry, but did not know toward what or whom the anger should be directed; it was as though one felt betrayed, but could never determine the manner of the betrayal. And this was what was making his mother old before her time…

He smoked, looked about vacantly, avoiding her accusing eyes, and was already fighting down a feeling of defensive guilt. She turned and began rummaging aimlessly in a dresser drawer and he knew that she was deliberately making him wait before she spoke, attempting to reduce him again to the status of a fearfully impressionable child. Before pronouncing her condemnations, she would make him feel that she was weighing him in the scales of her drastic judgment and was finding, to her horror, that he was a self-centered libertine ruthlessly ridden by this lust for pleasure, an irresponsible wastrel thoughtlessly squandering his life's substance. And afterwards he would listen with a face masked in indifference and he would know that she was right; but he would also know that there was nothing that neither he nor she could do about it, that there was no cure for his malady, and, above all, that this dilemma was the meaning of his life.

Long ago, in his fourteenth year, while standing waiting for her preachments, he had demanded to know
why she always pinioned him in solitude before handing down her moral laws, and she had replied that it was to make him develop the habit of reflecting deeply, that he knew as well as she when he had done wrong and she wanted to teach him to be his own judge. Anger now rose in him and he sought for some way to make her feel it. He grew suddenly resentful of the rickety furniture of the room. It's her own damn fault if she lives like this…She could be living comfortably with Gladys…

Yet, even as he thought it, he knew that he was wrong. Gladys and his mother hated each other; once, when they had lived together during the early days of his marriage, Gladys and his mother had vied for female dominance in the home and it had ended with his mother's packing and leaving, declaring that she preferred to live alone rather than with a wilful daughter-in-law who did not respect her.

“Why do you insist on living like this?” he broke the ice.

“We're not going to talk about how
I'm
living,” she countered.

“No matter. But why do you live like this?” he asked again.

“And why do you live as
you're
living?” she demanded bitterly turning to him. “You're drinking again. I can
smell
it.”

“Not much,” he said; his voice was clipped but controlled.

Her right hand dabbed clumsily at a tear on her wrinkled cheek. She slid into a chair and cried, her withered lips twisting, her false teeth wobbling loosely in shrunken gums.

“You've started spoiling little girls, taking advantage of children…Son, can't you
control
yourself? Where's
all this leading you? Why in God's name do you lie to a little girl like Dot and seduce her?”

“I didn't lie—”

“You
did
!” she blazed. “You let her hope for what you couldn't do, and that's lying. I'm no fool! If you didn't lie to her, that's worse. Then she's just a little whore. And if she's a whore, why did you take up with her? Cross, it's easy to fool a young girl. If you're proud of this cheap trick, you've fallen lower than I thought you had.”

She had done it; she had evoked in him that shameful mood of guilt born of desire and fear of desire. He knew that she was not lamenting for him alone, but for her own betrayed maidenhood, for how she had once been so treacherously beguiled into trusting surrender; she was blaming him somehow for its having gone wrong, confusedly seeking his masculine sympathy for her sexually blighted life! Goddamn her! Hadn't she no sense of shame? He imagined himself rising and with a single sweep of his palm slapping her to the floor. And in the same instant a poignant pity for her seized him. Poor, lost, lonely woman clinging for salvation to a son who she knew was as lost as she was. He was too close to her and too far from her; much too warm toward her and much too cold. If only he understood her less! But he was cut off from that; he was anchored in a knowledge that offended him. And this image of his mother's incestuously-tinged longings would linger with him for days and he could curse her for it, and finally he would curse himself for living in a crazy world that he could not set right.