“When I have put that down, I have perhaps sketched a character, I have done the sort of thing a novelist probably does before writing his book. But I have not even scratched the surface of Harry Mason. Everything I have listed is subject to contradiction by other characteristics, open to qualification in degree and kind; everything has a history that goes back and back toward a vanishing point. His history is important. It is important to know that he ran away from home at fourteen, and why; that he worked in the woods and on the railroad; that he was disappointed in his ambition to be a big league ball player. It is valuable to remember that all his ancestors as far back as I know anything about them were pioneers, and that he was born when almost all the opportunities for pioneering were gone. It is necessary to look at his father, about whom I know nothing except that the Andersonville prison spoiled his disposition. Probably it didn’t spoil his disposition at all, but only let out something that was already there. It would be as accurate to say that the strain of living outside the law has soured my father’s temper. Actually he has always had it. It’s like the tar in tar paper. When it’s new and fresh the tar is distributed, the paper holds it. Under conditions of sun or rain or exposure the tar begins to lump or ooze out. The process of growing older is perhaps a simple process of breaking down cell walls, releasing things that have for a while been bound up in the firmness of young muscle.
“And how far back beyond one ought to go, and how infinitely much one could fill in to the bare outline of two generations! I can‘t, obviously, make even a beginning. What bred that evil temper and that egotism and that physical energy and that fine set of senses and that manual dexterity and that devotion to pipedreams into Harry Mason, into his violent old father, into the generations hidden down below the eroded surface of the present?
“To know what Harry Mason is, as of January, 1931, I should have to know every thought, accident, rebuff, humiliation, triumph, emotion, that ever happened to him and all his ancestors, and beyond that I should have to weigh him against a set of standards to which I was willing to subscribe. That would be understanding, but that kind of understanding can only happen instantaneously in the mind of God.”
So where do I start? he said. He had been writing furiously for three quarters of an hour, but he hadn’t even come to a starting point. Nothing in the whole texture of his life or his family’s life was arbitrary, yet he could approach it only by being arbitrary. There were too many things he couldn’t know.
All right, he said, I’ll start with the things I do know.
“I suppose I have always hated him, probably not always with justice. Most children whose fathers are not completely housebroken must have that same hatred in greater or less degree. Yet if a father is housebroken he is less than God, and open to contempt. It must be a hard thing to be a father. To get away with it, a man should have both strength and patience, and patience my father never had. I know that I hold things against him that were my fault, times when I whined or disobeyed or didn’t listen, but still, to have one’s nose rubbed in one’s own excrement, or have his collarbone broken by his father’s knocking him end over end across the woodbox, are humiliations that a child cannot easily forget or forgive. It helps not at all to know that your father is often sorry and ashamed after a blow-up.
“When the child is a cry-baby, as I was, the situation gets worse, because the cry-baby runs to his mother and there arises a combination of mother and child against father. (I wonder what crybabyishness in a child becomes as the child matures? What is the connection between uncontrolled bawling in a child and uncontrolled rage in a man? It is curious to think that maybe my father as a child was a cry-baby.)
“My hatred of him seems to arise from two things: his violence to me, and his inability or unwillingness to see that he was misusing my mother. It is possible that she has never thought herself misused, though I know she has always hated the liquor business, and has thought that Chet with another kind of start would have done better.
“Add to those reasons my own adolescent snobbishness. I was ashamed of the old man all the time I was in college. I was envious of boys whose fathers were respectable, companionable, understanding, everything that mine was not. I hated the flashiness he put on in his clothes, I hated what I saw as boorishness in his manners. I don’t believe we’ve had a friendly and open conversation since I was twelve, and I know he hasn’t kissed me since at least that long ago. I think he has been afraid to.
“It used to drive me crazy, wondering why mother stayed with him. I have asked her a dozen times why she didn’t leave him. I’d get a job and support her. She always said that I didn’t understand. Understand what? There’s only one thing she could have meant, that she loved him. That, and her belief that loyalty to your own actions is the highest virtue, are the only reasons she would have stayed. She made her bed, and she’ll lie in it till she dies in it. That kind of loyalty, without love, would be stupider than I think any action of mother’s could be, but even without love, it is more admirable than anything the old man can show. I don’t think he has ever faced the consequences of an act; he shuts his eyes and gets mad.
“Chet’s the same way, only he never did have a bad temper. It was only when the old man pushed him around that he got hard and mulish. Somehow the tar missed him; and though it seems a mad thing to say, I think he is weaker for not having it. When things go wrong for him he broods. He was that way at Christmas, having trouble with Laura, thinking about how he had to come crawling back last year and ask charity from the family. It’s a pity that he couldn’t have stayed with baseball, but once he got his back up he wouldn’t admit his mistake about Laura. If he had, he wouldn’t be out of work now, and he wouldn’t have had to take that blow in his pride. I could have cried, almost, at Christmas, the way he’s got so gentle with me. He used to be always horsing around and sparring at me and kidding me. Now he’s Big Brother, obviously proud of me, taking me on as an equal and in some ways, painfully, as a superior. And there was that graduation present he bought me just after he’d come back, when he didn’t have a dime and was still looking for work and was still raw from having to ask the old man to help him out. I know he stole the money for that cigarette lighter from the baby’s bank, and that Laura found him out and they had a fight.
“That was a nasty time for him, and I don’t imagine it’s much better now, driving a taxi. I remember how he was when he came back, after the mine closed down and he lost his job. All day he’d sit in the front room learning to play a Hawaiian guitar, twanging away on ‘The Rosary,’ a sick tune if there ever was one, sit. ting there all alone, wrapped in some kind of personal isolation, while the baby cried and Laura scolded and mother tried to keep things smooth ... There’s a defeat in that picture that I hate, because Chet is a good fellow. He’d give you his shirt in zero weather. I guess he missed the old man’s selfishness, too—and in a way that too weakens him. I hate to see him whipped before he’s twenty-four, hopelessly practising a home course in taxidermy, and fooling with that damned guitar.
“And the dreams, the hopelessly rosy dreams. I remember just after I’d gone back for the holidays, when we were taking a shower together and harmonizing in the bathroom. He thought we could work up some songs, go in for a vaudeville act, try to get on the Pantages circuit. He actually had got himself believing it was possible. It isn‘t, even though he can sing. I don’t know why it’s impossible, but I know it, and I knew it then. It all belongs with the taxidermy and the dead magpies in the basement and the glue and paper and feathers, and the interminable damned- guitar twanging ‘The Rosary.’
“That’s a defeat that the old man is at least partly responsible for. Mother’s is another.
“Yet it’s important to remember that he isn’t a monster, as I used to think he was. He doesn’t tramp on people out of meanness. They get in his road, that’s all, or he’s tied to them and drags them along with him. He can even be kind, and I guess that now I think of it I can see why mother loved
him once and maybe still does. I saw that when she got sick a year ago.
“When she came out that morning with the queer look on her face and said that she’d found a big lump in her breast, their eyes jumped to meet each other, and it seemed to me that all of a sudden I could see what living together twenty-five years can do to two people. They asked and answered a dozen questions in that one look.
“I remember her operation, too, the way the old man woke me at six in the morning to go to the hospital. He probably hadn’t slept much. But he couldn’t stand it down there. He held her hand while they gave her the ether—and I suppose I was jealous that she wanted him, not me—but the minute they began getting ready, and Cullen came out of the washroom with his scrubbed hands in the air for a nurse to pull the gloves on, the old man lurched out as white as chalk. Once or twice during the operation I saw his face looking in the operating room door, but it never stayed more than a second or two, and when Cullen came back with the slides and said it was malignant, that it meant radical surgery, we had to hunt for two or three minutes to find the old man. He was sitting out on the fire escape, gray clear to the lips. He just nodded when Cullen told him, and he never made a move to come in again. If he had he probably would have fainted, because it was like a butcher’s block.
“Afterwards he visited her twice a day, brought her candy, filled her room with flowers. He even tried to talk to me about her and get me to say she would probably be all right now, wouldn’t she? There wasn’t anything left for cancer to grow in, was there? I’m afraid I didn’t give him much help. I didn’t think then, and I don’t now, that she has more than a fifty-fifty chance of its not coming back. I suppose I acted cold, but it was only because I was talking to him. I agonized over it enough, because I love my mother, and respect her, more than anyone I have ever met, and that’s not anything a psychologist can grin about. Why shouldn’t I? There’s a positive flame in her, a curious little bright flame that never goes down.
“But the old man was good to her then. He wouldn’t have talked her into going to visit Kristin if he had been thinking only of himself. Maybe he thought that she might not live long, that he owed her a visit home. He suggested that she go through Hardanger and see the people they’d known when they were first married, and just before she left, when Chet and Laura and the baby came in from the mine, he agreed without a whimper to take them in. Give him credit: he’s kept them ever since, even if he has grumbled.
“She enjoyed that trip. Nobody in Hardanger recognized her at first, and she had fun being mysterious and letting recognition dawn on them. They gave her the keys to the town, apparently. That must be a curious feeling, to go back after twenty-five years and see all your friends grown gray and fat and bald, and count the stones in the graveyard, and know that you’ve grown older along with everything else. Anyway she enjoyed it, and she came back in better health.
“Maybe she’ll get by. Maybe there’s a chance that after I finish here I can get her to break loose from that life. She deserves some friends, she deserves a rest. She’s had too long a vacation from any sort of normal woman’s life.
“It’s an almost marvellous fact that a dozen years of living among bootleggers and pimps and bellhops and all the little scummy riffraff on the edge of the criminal class hasn’t touched her—simply hasn’t touched her. Neither has the constant sacrifice she has had to make of her own wishes and her own life. It’s almost comical to see how completely those small-time thugs respect her. She has been the repository of the confessions and woes of half a dozen kept women, she’s been within smelling distance of a dozen stinking episodes, she has had for companions altogether too many foul-mouthed, unscrupulous, lying, cheating, vicious people, but all they have succeeded in doing is to make her kindly-wise. For all her yielding and her self-sacrificing, there is something in her that doesn’t give when it’s pushed at. She only gives up her wishes, never herself.”
Bruce stretched his cramped fingers and looked up. This could go on all night and he would be no closer to what he was after. Probably when he read over what he had written he wouldn’t even agree with half of it. He picked up his mother’s letter again. No mention of how the double-family arrangement was going now, nothing about how the old man was behaving. Chet had finally agreed to go back to the business school, which he had started once and then dropped. His father was looking at a little sporting goods shop down on Second South, with the idea that he might buy it and set Chet up as manager. They hadn’t said anything to Chet yet, and it was still only an idea, but she hoped it would come about. Chet was sick now, in bed. A week ago they had driven up to watch the ski jumping at Ecker Hill, and Chet had helped push some people out of the snow, and had got overheated and caught cold. He was running a little fever, and if he didn’t get over it by tomorrow she was going to send him down to the hospital. The baby was fine, it was wonderful to have a child around the house again.
Without moving from the desk, Bruce scribbled off a letter. He had been hitting the books pretty solidly since he came back. Examinations came up next week, but he wasn’t worrying too much. Maybe he’d go over to see Kristin one of these days. She was one of the great cookie-makers, and whenever he got tired of cafeteria food he liked to go over and have an orgy at her house. Also her kids were nice kids and George was a good quiet sensible sort of guy. A little home atmosphere was good after a few weeks of grinding. Too bad Chet was sick. “Give him an enema,” he said, “from me.”
Feet clumped on the hall linoleum and knuckles rapped at his door.
“Come in,” Bruce said.
It was Brucker, the fellow from the floor below, a graduate student in economics. “Just got sick of sitting on my tail,” he said, peering in. “You busy?”
“No. Come on in.”
His visitor flopped on the cot. “If I ever again hear the words Malthus, Mill, Pareto, or Marx,” he said, “I’ll puke.”
“That’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Bruce said. “Who is this guy Marx?”
Brucker stared at him. “You go to hell.”
“Come on, tell me about him. What’d he write?”
“I’ll strangle you,” the economist said. “I’m in no mood to be toyed with.”
Bruce laughed. “By the end of next week there won’t be a sane man in the house.”
“There isn’t one now,” Brucker said. “Boyer is down in his room lying on the bed playing with his toes, cackling like a madman. Nicholson has clutched his books unto his breast and rushed into the night toward the library so as to avoid a fine. Hadley has chucked the whole works and gone hunting a woman. How do you manage to stay up in this attic dungeon and crack the books?”
“One way is to send your only good pants to the cleaner’s so you can’t go out. Or maybe you have two pairs of pants.”
“Three,” Brucker said. “All of them so thin on the backside you can read a newspaper through them. That’s why I’m studying economics.”
“Come on out and let the wind blow through them,” Bruce said. “I’ve got to mail a letter.”
They went down the two flights of stairs and Bruce opened the door. Brucker sniffed. “What’s that smell?” he said suspiciously.
“I don’t smell anything.”
“By God, I do believe it’s fresh air,” the economist said.
As they walked to the corner, their collars up against the still cold, a messenger boy on a bicycle passed them. Under the arclight his face looked blue. He had a muffler wrapped around his ears and his cap crammed down over it. “Brrr!” Brucker said. “I’ll never again send a telegram in the winter time. It’s cruelty to animals.”
They sprinted from the corner back to the house, yelling, racing each other in an unpremeditated burst of energy up the stairs. At the top they met the messenger, his nose red and leaking. “Mason live up here?” he said.
“Yeah,” Bruce said, surprised. “Here.”
He watched the boy take the yellow envelope out of his hat. The sin
gle hall bulb threw his shadow hulking down the wall of the stairway. “Got a telegram with a money order attached,” he said. “You sign right here.”
“A money order?” Bruce said. He looked at Brucker and frowned. The shadow of the runty messenger heaved on the wall as the boy extended the book. Bruce looked at it without reaching out. The certainty was like ice in his throat. He looked again at Brucker. His voice came out of his tight throat in a dry, difficult whisper.
“My brother’s dead!” he said.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain Page 59
