The mantel clock said four o‘clock. It would be pleasant, she thought, to have somebody drop in (her eyes took in the amount of cleaning and straightening still necessary, and she retreated from her wish, then came back to it again. What difference did the condition of the house make? They had moved in only yesterday. Whoever would be coming would be a close friend). They would have a glass of iced tea and a cookie or cake, and sit and talk a while. It would be a relief to talk. For five days she hadn’t talked to anyone but furious people, sullen people, stubborn people, tearful people. She had had to play peace-maker to the whole bunch of them when she would rather have gone to her room and cried.
Somebody to talk to. What if Mrs. Webb came around?
Don’t be stupid, she said. You couldn’t talk to her, or to anyone except Bo or Bruce, and Bruce is gone for a week and Bo is still mad enough to fly off the handle at a word. You can sit and let it simmer inside you, that’s all you can do.
Now, she said, you really know what it is to be uprooted. You’re as homeless as a tramp on a park bench. You’ve pulled away from all your family and you’re alone in a room that isn’t really yours. You have a father, a step-mother who used to be your best friend, a sister, a brother, uncles and aunts and cousins, but you don’t know any of them any more except maybe Kristin.
Psycho-social isolation, her mind said. That was what Bruce had said about the way they lived, one day when they were talking in the parlor by the fire. She had laughed then at the big words, and at the half-playful venom with which he spat them out. Something he had got in school—another mysterious world that she saw only in reflections and heard only in echoes, through her children. Psycho-social isolation.
“Well, whatever you call it,” she said to the empty room, “I hate it!”
And oh, Chet, Chet, she said, why did you let it hit you so hard? You were strong enough to bear burdens and strains and fatigue. Why weren’t you strong enough to bear shame?
She rose and wandered around the room, picked up the metal elephant on the mantel, brushed the dust on it experimentally, set it down again. There was a box of stationery, two or three bottles of ink, some pens and pencils in a carton on the other end of the mantel, waiting for time when she could put them away. The clock said four-twenty. Bo wouldn’t be home till six, probably. She took paper, pen, and ink and went into the dining room. Somebody to talk to. The best she could do was Kristin, fifteen hundred miles away. Sitting with the pen in her hand she found herself crying again, her eyes running over without effort or strain or sobs, as if she were too tired to cry properly, but had to sit and simply drip from the eyes. And she knew she couldn’t write it, even to Kristin.
All she could do was think it, wonder why Chet had thrown up the whole works, even the trip with the ball team, even the chance he had been dreaming about for two or three years. Why he should be so humiliated and shamed that he would run off that way, take Laura with him, be so sullen and unapproachable when the police finally brought them back ...
But she knew, really. He wouldn’t have anything to do with anything his father had ever touched. He had meant that runaway as a final pulling-up of all the roots—he had meant never to come back. He had it in his mind that he couldn’t ever face anybody he knew, now. If he appeared at the ball park with the team he was afraid the people in the stands who knew him would say, “There’s Chet Mason. His old man got pinched for bootlegging a while back. He’s got a nerve, showing his face around.”
But to get married! she said. At seventeen! To run across the state line into Wyoming and lie about his age four years, and with only a few dollars in his pockets. To hate his father so bad he would do anything like that, give up his whole ambition, just to get away ...
Oh Lord, she said, and leaned her head on her hand. The whole business was mixed up and confused, but the confusion couldn’t eliminate the certainty of what had happened. It couldn’t make her forget the fury Laura’s father had been in, the way he gobbled and strangled over the telephone when the runaway had first been discovered, and the way Bo had shouted back at him. He would blame Chet himself, and be hard as nails with him, but he wouldn’t let Laura’s father blame him.
And all that argument, and Chet so sullen that he wouldn’t speak, and Laura shut up in her house and kept even from telephoning. She tried to think of what she might have said to Kristin if she had written, how she would have told about all that, even the buggy whip that Mr. Betterton had used on Laura, and how she had had to be peace-maker, calm Bo down, finally go down herself in a taxi and insist that Laura be allowed to come up and talk with her privately. She would have said how she had urged them both to submit to annulment, save trouble by letting the proceedings go through. They couldn’t fight it anyway. All they could do would be to make themselves and everybody else un-happier than they were. It was best to pretend that they hadn’t been for two days man and wife. They could go back to work and save their money and get married again after a few years, and it would be better.
Talking like that, all the time with Chet’s sullen face before her, and Laura twisting her hands, crying, so frightened of her father that she wailed, and said she had to get away, she couldn’t go back, why couldn’t people have left them alone? But it was Chet she worried about. He was too grim and silent, he too obviously hated Bo, and even if this was smoothed over she knew there would be other things, that Chet wouldn’t stay now.
It was Laura, she would have had to say to Kristin, who finally weakened. Chet would have stood up in court and shouted that they had lived together, and that the marriage shouldn’t be annulled. It was Laura who listened when she told them how hard life could be without enough money, how a few years spent saving now might make all the difference later. It was Laura who accepted the promise of help later, and agreed to let their fathers cancel the marriage. And it was Laura who convinced Chet.
Not, Elsa said bitterly, his mother. His mother couldn’t convince him of anything. Only his girl could, and she only because she was so scared, poor thing.
And what Chet had said when he finally agreed: “I’m doing this for you, Mom, not for him, and I’m never going to live at home again.” She hadn’t had the heart to tell Bo that. It would have made him boiling mad, but it would have hurt him too. And she hadn’t pointed out to Bo (and this she couldn’t have said to Kristin at all) that it was the whiskey business that was the cause of the whole trouble. She knew what his answer would have been: What could he do? He had to make a living somehow, didn’t he? How was he going to make up the loss brought on by this last raid? Christ Almighty, did she think he liked having the law in his hair all the time? Let him get a little ahead, and he’d quit, sure, but how could he quit now? And could he help it if the prohi making the raid was a hysterical damn fool and pinched the kid? Did she think he liked it?
Elsa pushed away the pen and ink and stood up. There wasn’t any of it you could tell Kristin. It was nothing that could be told. All you could do was shut your mouth and make the best of it. But the mere thought of making the best of it, reconciling yourself to the thought that your son went white with hatred when his father talked to him, that he had blown all his chances and might never pick them up again, that his sullenness might drive him to any sort of foolish and reckless act, made her bite her lips. Like the last two nights Chet had been home. Drunk both nights, she knew. But what could she say? What could she do? What argument could she have used to move him, brace him up, give him the feeling that his whole life wasn’t ruined? He was so sure it was. First, his mind seemed to say, Bo had spoiled his life at home for him, and now he had spoiled the only other life that had been open. All right, with both spoiled he would go to hell as fast as possible. It was silly, it was childish, but it was unstoppable, unless Chet came to himself, got a decent job up in Idaho where he’d gone, got on his feet again and hooked up with another ball team, something to give him confidence in himself and the world again... This trouble was only a moment, if he looked at it straight.
There was his whole life ahead of him.
She thought of what Bruce had said one day at Brighton. He had amazed her then, as he sometimes did, with the things that went on in his mind. People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren’t any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.
It was too complicated an idea for her, but it seemed to her now that if she could bring herself to look at Chet as a line and not as a point she might even be able to laugh. If she could only look back and fix her mind on escapades of his childhood. He was always getting into scrapes, having the neighbors over for drinks during the flu epidemic in Whitemud, stealing that gun from Tex Davis’ shack and thinking how big and tough he was with a man-sized forty-four, getting into trouble years ago back at that home in Seattle, when she had had to take the boys out and go home to Indian Falls...
She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn’t seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort.
Chet came home, but not because he wanted to. A week after he and Van went up into Idaho they got drunk in Idaho Falls and were thrown in the bullpen for the night. When they were released next day and asked to get out of town they decided to hit for Ashton, up in the high timber country, to see if anything was stirring in the sawmills or placer mines. Ten miles out of Idaho Falls they hit a pile of gravel and rolled over. Van, wedged behind the wheel, had three broken ribs, a broken collar bone, and a badly skinned face. Chet, thrown clear, broke his right arm in two places. A passing motorist took them back to Idaho Falls, where they spent all their remaining money for doctor bills. As soon as Van was able to travel, they came back to Salt Lake on the train, their fare paid by Van’s mother.
For almost two weeks Chet stayed sullenly at home, hardly going out of the house except to the drugstore for newspapers and magazines. All morning he sat with the paper, all afternoon with a magazine, his feet propped on a chair and his sling adjusted across his stomach. Even to his mother he said nothing about his marriage or what had come after it, nothing about how the accident had happened, nothing about what he was going to do when his arm knitted. He did not, so far as any of them saw, have any communication with Laura. Nobody ever saw him use the telephone or write any letters.
At the end of two weeks, when his arm was out of the cast, he asked his mother for a little money. She had none at hand except a few dollars left from the household allowance, but she gave him that without asking questions. He counted it. Eleven dollars.
“Can you get me a little more?” he said. “Ten dollars or so?”
“Are you going away again, Chet?”
He nodded. “For good,” he said.
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you write? Promise.”
“I’ll write,” he said. “Don’t think I’m blaming you, Mom. You’ve been swell. I’ll write to you.”
That night she asked Bo for twenty dollars. He looked up in surprise, because she rarely asked him for money beyond her allowance. But he didn’t ask what she wanted it for. Without a word he dug it out of his wallet and she slipped it under the base of the lamp by Chet’s bed.
The next morning, after Bo had gone downtown, Chet came into the kitchen with his suitcase packed. She wanted to hold him, hang onto him, beg him not to go, to stay and get a job in town and forget all that had happened, but his face was so somberly still that she didn’t. She was as helpless to keep him with her now as she had been to prevent the whole debacle that had driven him into himself.
“Goodbye, Chet,” she said, and felt his arms tighten around her. There was that comfort at least; he loved her, nothing that had happened had alienated him from her. “You’ve got so little money,” she said. “Why don’t you wait and I’ll get some more.”
“I wouldn’t want more,” Chet said. “I’ll take enough of his money to get me out of town, and that’s all.”
“You’re bitter,” she said, searching his eyes. “Don’t hold things against your dad. He feels bad that things worked out the way they did. And if you get in any trouble, or even if you don‘t, write to him. He’d be pleased to help you, Chet. Do you know that?”
“I guess he won’t have the chance,” Chet said. “I’m not going to get into any trouble.”
“But you’ll write ... him too.”
He squeezed her hands, the grip of his left hand hard, that of his right weaker, feeble from the recent injury. “Take care of yourself,” he said. “I’ll let you know where I land.”
And there he went, Elsa thought, there he went, this time for good.
Three months later, from Rapid City, South Dakota, she got a postcard. Chet and Laura were married again.
VIII
From his window on the third story Bruce could look out over a flat acreage of lights climbing upward to the signboards and the tall mills along the Mississippi. The river itself was a sunken black channel with firefly lights moving mysteriously along its bottom, and against the glow of the St. Paul side he saw the superstructure of the bridge he crossed every morning on his way to class.
He had picked the highest room he could find, because he hated the flat country. The sky came down too close all around, like a smothering tent, and an eye that wanted to look out was constantly interrupted by buildings, trees, the swell of low hills. Even outside the city, where he had gone hopefully on walks, he had found no place high enough to give him a view, no place flat enough to let him see more than a quarter of a mile. The upper-floor room helped some. It gave him a chance at night to pretend that the lights he looked down on were much farther away than they really were, and to cultivate his nostalgia for the high benches around Salt Lake with the forty-mile valley wide open below him, the state road a string of distended yellow lights on down toward the Jordan narrows, the slag dumps at Magna and West Jordan belching gobbets of fire on the black slope of the Oquirrhs.
He was homesick and almost terrifyingly alone. He ought to go out to a movie, or get busy on torts. There were plenty of things to do if he could bring his mind to them, but instead he went and sat on the window sill, opened the sash to let in a blast of cold January air, and sat looking out.
Bruce Mason, he said. Bruce Mason, first year law. There was something almost cosmically ironical about his choice of profession. He remembered what Bill Levine, a friend of his father‘s, had said when he heard it. That big gross animal with the shrunken legs, sitting in his wheel chair all day with a sanctimonious look on his face, a look that said, “See, I’m a cripple, I have to sell taffy and nuts on the street for a living. A nickel for a bag of nuts will help keep life in a body that the world has miserably misused!” And under cover of the taffy and nuts he would arrange you a woman, sell you a stolen car, get you a bottle or a case, give you a card to the hop joints in Plum Alley, play procurer and pimp with his patient, resigned smile that covered a lewdness as deep and stinking as the pit.
“There’s nothing like a lawyer in the family,” he had said. “Eh Harry?”
Bruce shut the window and stood up. And what, he said, would you do if you became a public prosecutor and found yourself prosecuting your old man? Would you send him to McNeil Island for, two years for conspiracy to evade the prohibition law? That would make a nice little problem in family loyalty and public duty. Would you sprinkle dust on Polynices’ head, or leave him for the wolves?
If I only under
stood better, he said. If I really knew what I think, what I am, what he is and mother is and Chet is, how everything got off on the wrong foot. If I knew how and why mother has stood it for over twenty-five years, I might know something.
He got out his mother’s last letter, delivered that morning, written three days before. It was a good letter, but it told him nothing of what he wanted to know. Everything that was tangled or thwarted or broken in the family relationships was carefully held back.
If a man could understand himself and his own family, Bruce thought, he’d have a good start toward understanding everything he’d ever need to know. He laid his mother’s letter down and sprawled his legs under the desk. The book on torts was at his elbow. He tossed it over on the cot and reached for a notebook.
“This is not a journal,” he wrote. “It is not notes for a novel, not a line-a-day record of the trivia my mind dredges up. Call it an attempt to understand.”
Understand what? he said. Where do I begin? With myself, my father, his father, his grandfather? When did the germ enter? Where did the evil come in?
“I suppose,” he wrote, “that the understanding of any person is an exercise in genealogy. A man is not a static organism to be taken apart and analyzed and classified. A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. He runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime. The proper study of mankind is man, but man is an endless curve on the eternal graph paper, and who can see the whole curve?
“What is my father? What is my mother? What is my brother? What am I? Those sound like fatuous questions, but they occupy our whole lives. Suppose I said my father is a bootlegger who lives in Salt Lake City, is easily irritated, has occasional spells of intense good spirits? Suppose I said he wears a diamond like a walnut in his tie and another as big as a pickled onion on his finger, that he pays a hundred dollars apiece for his suits. Those are observable characteristics. Or suppose I said that all his life he has been haunted by the dream of quick wealth and isn’t quite unscrupulous enough to make his dream come true, that he is a gambler who isn’t quite gambler enough, who has a streak of penuriousness in him, a kind of dull Dutch caution, so that he gambles with one hand and holds back a stake with the other. He might have made a mint playing the market before the crash; instead he bought gilt-edged stocks outright and made less. Suppose I labelled him: a self-centered and dominating egotist who insists on submission from his family and yet at the same time is completely dependent on his wife, who is in all the enduring ways stronger than he is. Suppose I listed his talents: a violent stubbornness that butts through things and often overcomes them, immense energy (generally in the wrong causes), a native tendency to be generous that is always being overcome by his developing greediness and his parsimonious penny-pinching. Add a vein of something like poetic talent, a feeling for poetry of a certain sort, as witness his incredible performance last summer of quoting, after a lapse of almost thirty years, pages and pages of Burns that he had learned in the Wisconsin woods.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain Page 58
