“I told you I’d cry!” she said, and put her hands over her face.
3
That night Bruce sat reading a dull and blundering volume of history while his mother and father talked in the glassed porch. He heard their voices, and even more clearly the pauses in their talk. Miss Hammond sat under the other lamp stitching at one of her patient’s nightgowns. Once she glanced up and said, “What are you studying so hard?”
“History.”
“What for? Going back to school?”
“Sometime, maybe.” He saw her lower her head again, embarrassed at having come too close to the thing they all avoided.
His eyes were on the white jamb of the door through which the voices of his father and mother came low and intimate. What could they find to talk about so long?
In a few minutes his father came to the door of the sickroom. “I guess she wants to get to sleep,” he said to Miss Hammond.
The nurse went in, came out after awhile and nodded to Bruce, and he went in and took his mother’s hand. “Well,” he said. She squeezed his hand and shook it lightly. Her hair was braided again for the night, and the shaded bedlamp threw shadows on her face so that it looked pinched and starved. “It’s been a lovely day,” she said.
“I’m glad. You look better than you have for quite a while.”
“I feel better,” she said. “You must be tired from moving.” She lay for a while looking quietly past and beyond, at the wall or at nothing. “Where’s everyone going to sleep down here?” she said. “You’ve given me the nicest place, and Pa says there’s only one other bedroom.”
“He’ll be in that. I’ll sleep in the murphy bed in the living room, and Miss Hammond’s got a cot set up in the dining room.”
“She can’t be comfortable on a cot. Isn’t there anything ... ?”
“I tried to make her take the murphy. She won’t.”
Her hand held his, patted it, as if unwilling to give it up. “Well, goodnight, then,” she said.
“Goodnight.” He stooped to kiss her. Trust the old man to sit and talk and tire her out completely. She hardly had strength to turn over in bed. The old brainless fumbling ...
“Sleep tight,” he said, and left her.
Miss Hammond closed the door all but a crack, so that the light would not bother her, and then the three sat in the living room, the old man with his hands on his knees, vacant and unoccupied, his body slumped in the chair. He looked old and dissipated and sick, his face dark, with black bags under his eyes. Bruce watched him covertly, saw him put up a hand to rub his face, heard the rasp of bristles under the big square hand.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave
And scarcely the strength of a louse ...
The lines jumped to his mind, and with them the memory, clear and sharp, of the family around the stove in the little parlor in Whitemud, his mother darning, he and Chet hugging their knees on the floor to hear their father read Robert W. Service. Liking it, he said. Lapping it up, fascinated and impressed, loving him then, briefly, absorbing images and inflections and words that would never leave the mind, that would always be a part of his memory of the time when they had lived in one house for five years. It was incredible that at times, in his childhood, he had watched the dark face of his father with love and admiration and trust ...
His eyes went rubbering round the room
And he seemed in a sort of daze ...
“She’s gone,” his father said. Bruce lowered his book and looked up. His father’s face was ghastly, and his mouth worked. “You can see it just to look at her,” he said. “She’s so quiet, she’s got no interest in anything.”
Bruce said nothing, and Miss Hammond, after one quick look, dropped her head over her mending. “All but her eyes,” the old man said. With a puzzled face he looked directly at Bruce for the first time. “You’d never know it by her eyes,” he said. “They’re just as bright and clear ... You’d never know she’d been sick a day.”
He rubbed his palm across his face again. “What’re you reading?”
Bruce held up the book.
“Studying, uh? Yeah.” The momentary interest flickered out. “It’s the dope,” he said. “She’s hopped up all the time. She can hardly make herself listen to what you’re saying.”
“Maybe she didn’t want to,” Bruce said. “She’s weak. She hasn’t got the strength to talk much.”
His father stood up. His trousers were bagged and wrinkled, and there were cigar ashes on his sleeve. He started to say something, closed his mouth, shot a look of quick hard suspicion at Bruce, and wandered over- to the dining room table, through the sliding doors. He swung around.
“How long?” he said.
Bruce shook his head. “I asked Cullen. He can’t tell. He says if she didn’t have a heart like a horse she’d be gone now.”
The old man moistened his lips. “Yuh,” he said vaguely. He stayed with his finger tips touching the table, turned again. “Do you think I ...” He stopped, took his fingers off the wood, and went through the hall to his own bedroom, shutting the door behind him.
Bruce drew a deep breath, looked once at Miss Hammond’s troubled face, and opened the book again.
He awoke late. Miss Hammond had his place set at the breakfast table, but the other dishes were all washed and put away. His father was not around.
“My dad gone uptown already?” he said as he came in from the bathroom.
“He’s gone away,” Miss Hammond said. She went to the cupboard and got an envelope. “He left this, and said he’d be gone three or four days.”
“Well what in hell!” Bruce said. He opened the envelope. There were some bills in it. Forty dollars. “Did he say where he was going?”
“No. I gathered it was business. He had to go, he said.”
“Yeah!” Bruce said, starting for the bedroom. “Is mother awake?”
“Yes. She seems to know all about it.”
At the door of the porch Bruce checked himself. He couldn’t rush in there in a fury and demand an explanation. For a moment he stood gnawing his lip, and glancing back at Miss Hammond he saw with absolute clearness the nurse’s complex of bewilderment and sympathy and desire to stay back out of family troubles. But even while he was looking at her he forgot her. So the old man had skipped. He put his teeth together and went into the porch.
“Hi,” he said. Her smiling face turned toward him, but in the first glance he knew that something had happened to her. She was worse. There was no brightness in her. He came up and laid his hand on her forehead, cool and moist as putty. “How is it this morning?” he said. “I was a pig. I slept till eight thirty.”
“Good,” she said, as if her mouth were almost too tired to form the word. Her smile was only a crinkling of the lines around her eyes.
“Miss Hammond says Pa’s gone,” he said, watching her, seeing in her face how close the end was now, how she seemed to grope in a mist, make an effort to look out from somewhere, like a person looking backward from the moving observation car of a train. The wrinkles deepened around her eyes, that was all.
“He’s been shut up too long,” she said.
“I don’t see ...” he began, but she stopped him.
“Don’t blame him,” she said. “He just ... wasn’t made for it.”
“He must have had an excuse,” he said. “He’s always got an excuse.”
His mother smiled. “He went for a load. He had to be doing something.”
“Did he tell you first?”
“He told me last night. Patton’s got some stuff waiting for him in Los Angeles. He’ll be back in a few days.”
He said nothing more, but he saw in her face everything he needed to know. She wouldn’t last those three days, and the old man had known it. She had said her goodbyes and sent him out knowing she wouldn’t live till his return, and she lay there now ready at any time, living only by physiological habit. That was the change he had seen when he came in. There had been an air o
f resistance in her before. Something (the old man’s cowardice?) had broken the brightness and will in her.
“Shall I read to you?” he said.
“Yes. Would you?”
Even while he read with an automatic voice, using only the top of his mind, the floor of his mind was uneasy with rage and contempt and wonder. To pull out, to run, to leave her when he knew she was dying, to go after a load of whiskey, worry himself into a fifteen hundred mile trip on the pretense that he was getting low on money, couldn’t afford to stay off the job any longer , .. At his wife’s funeral he would probably take orders for cases of Scotch. Oh the God damned contemptible selfish cowardly heartless old bastard!
“Yes?” his mother said. He looked up, confused, and realized that he had stopped reading.
“Sorry,” he said, and picked up the story where he thought he must have broken off.
Now for two days he watched and waited with sick and hopeless certainty, his. mother farther and farther away, withdrawing deeper into herself and the numbing morphine.
It was obscene and unjust the way she had to die. Loving her as he did, he was offended a dozen times a day by the sour smell of her sweat in the sickroom and the horror of the noises she made in breathing. It outraged him that she could not die sweetly and quietly, with her family around her, wrapped in love and the sense of a life that had fruited and borne. Instead, she lay most of the time like a stranger, her hair soaked and her skin clammy, running down like an old cheap clock, with her husband gone and one son miserably dead and the other unable to reach her.
In the times when she roused from her doped coma, Bruce sat with her, sometimes reading, though he was sure she didn’t listen except to the sound of his voice. But she was altogether better awake than asleep. Her breathing was easier, and far away as she was, her words had sometimes a strange oracular wisdom, a tolerance untouched by personal feeling, as if she had withdrawn far enough not to be moved any more, far enough to see her life as a wry comedy, the world as a goldfish tank in which fishes of all sizes and shapes and colors went after food, made love, nosed with incomprehensible and unimportant compulsions up and down, up and down, against the glass walls, or lay suspended among the water plants, insulated from watchers by the different element they lived in.
“Did you know,” she said to Bruce on the second afternoon, “that your dad is keeping another woman?”
“No,” he said slowly. “I did not!”
She smiled. “For quite a while now,” she said, and made her little face, the lines deepening around her eyes. “He had her in Reno. Now he’s got her here.”
“How do you know?”
“I can smell her,” she said. She shook her head at him slightly. “I shouldn’t have told you. You’ll take it hard.”
The biting edges of his teeth were set precisely together. He felt the little trench along the edge of the incisors, and his mind said, accurately and scientifically, Faulty occlusion. But through his teeth he said aloud, “Why shouldn’t I take it hard? Why shouldn’t you?”
“I don‘t,” she said. “I don’t seem to care. I can’t blame him. I haven’t been any good as a wife for a long time.”
That intimacy outraged him, as he had been outraged during adolescence to see them kissing. He sat very still and said nothing.
“Bruce,” she said, and took hold of his fingers. “Don’t blame him too much. There’s something in him that has to have a woman to lean on. He’s leaned on me all his life, but he can’t now.”
“When you get sick,” he said. “When you can’t take care of his boils and wipe his nose and listen to his troubles, he abandons you and finds some slut ...”
“No,” she said. She smiled at him wearily, wiser than he would ever be, not bothered either by her husband’s weakness or her son’s hatred, not part of it any more, withdrawing, smiling remotely on the pillow with her braids down across her shoulders. “Don‘t,” she said.
“Oh my God!” He stood up, blinded by the pressure that in a moment would be tears. Abruptly he left her, motioned at Miss Hammond as he went through the living room with averted face, and shut himself in the bathroom.
During that day workmen had installed a neon sign on the front of the apartment house across the street, and with the apartment darkened the bluish echo of its light lay on the walls. Miss Hammond was lying down, and Bruce stretched out on the murphy bed, forcing his mind away from the snoring breath in the sickroom, forcing himself to think of anything, everything, that there was life in—the sensuous shape and texture of the world, the nights and days and hours and moments when the burden was removed and a man was himself and himself only, wrapped in his own bright identity beyond which there was nothing. He thumbed them over like pictures from an old album, discarding these because there was a shadow on them, laying others aside to be looked at more carefully. His mind adjusted itself, re-focussed, as the eyes adjust to the parallax of a stereopticon lens, and in the timelessness of memory the pictures sprang into three dimensions, permanent and ineradicable, the things that had life in them instead of death..
The sky was a wonder to him then, the immense blackness and the lustrous stars, on a night when his parents took him out to a neighbor’s after dark, put him to sleep in a strange bedroom, and out of his sleep pulled him lost and groping and clinging to slumber, to load him into the buggy. There, cradled in his mother’s lap, he opened his eyes fully and saw the wonder, the black roof with the glory streaming through its rents, and the miracle of a night sky would always be with him; there would never be another night of his life when the sight of the stars would not have in it some of that first awe and wonder, when his jaded perception would not borrow freshness from that original bright image in the eyes of a star-gazing child.
That was one. That was one of many. They were not all visual images, he discovered, sorting them out. There were smells and sounds and old tunes sung over and over until they gathered to themselves all the associations of the places and times in which they had been sung.
His mother’s snoring breath went up catchily, grating in the sick lungs to its tremulous climax, paused, came out in the windy sigh. Bruce shut his mind on it, turned away, fled, just as he had lain still and pretended to sleep as a child, when the windstorms blew the slatted curtains and tubs and buckets began tumbling in the homestead yard: he had lain snug and warm, hearing the padding of feet and his father’s grumbling, and he had known he should get up to help, but the sheets were warm, the bed was comfortable, sleep lay just around the corner where he had left it ...
There was the smell of hot chokecherry patches, hillsides hot under the sun, and spice and bark and leaf mold and the fruity odor of the berries, and the puckery alum tang of a ripe cluster stripped into the mouth, the feel of the pits against the palate—the free and wild and windy feeling of late summer on the bench hills, and the odor of the berry patch through it like a theme. It was an odor that he had never quite found again, though dozens of times, in the canyons, on sunny streets under the lines of Lombardy poplars, in warehouses, in stores, he had stopped, sniffing, his nose assailed by a tantalizing fragrance that was almost it but not quite. That smell, or its ghost, could bring him out of reverie or talk or concentration deep as a well, and leave him for a moment free from time, eager and alive and excited, in search of an odor that was more than a memory, that was a permanent reality.
And the songs:
The Bugle Song on the bank of the coulee among the early summer blossoming of primrose and cactus and buttercup, with the ghostly mountains far down across the heat-scorched plain; the song that had always meant, and meant now, all romantic yearning, all nostalgia for the never-never and the wonderful; that still, in spite of all he had learned since, could have an instant effect on him, choke him up, clog his tear ducts, make him, driving alone on an open road singing to himself, wipe his hand across his eyes and laugh with self-conscious shame.
A childhood-hunter, a searcher for old forgotten far-off things and
battles long ago, a maunderer. He knew it. Yet the words of life were in those songs and those smells and the green dreams of childhood; in his life there had been the death of too many things.
He shifted in the bed, realizing that not anything he had been thinking of had cut off the sound of his mother’s breathing. Oh Christ, he said. I wish ...
He sat up. The light had gone on in the bedroom, and the breathing was broken. In three steps he was through the door, the fear like a hand clenched in his shirt. His mother lay moving her head weakly from side to side, her forehead puckered, her face and neck wet.
“Will you turn ... on the light?” she said.
He stared at her. She was looking straight up into the brightness of the lamp.
“Sure,” he said, from a dry mouth. “I should have put a string on that switch.” He rattled the metal pull of the lamp. “Better?”
She did not answer directly, but moved her hand toward the water glass. The bewildered look was fading from her face. He helped her take a sip of water, wiped her face with a towel, turned her pillow. When Miss Hammond appeared in the doorway he told her to go and lie down again. He would sit up a while. It was still early.
His mother lay back, the light stark on her sunken cheeks and wet skin. “It was so dark,” she said fuzzily. “I thought everyone ... had gone.”
“Try to go back to sleep,” he said. “I’ll sit here with you a while.”
Her fingers found his and clung, and with her hand alternately clenching and relaxing on his she appeared to doze. The agonized fight for breath went on. After a few minutes he pulled off the light. The neon blue fluttered for a moment through the venetian blinds, steadied to a pale laddered glimmer. The tires of passing cars whispered and hissed in the rainy street.
This is it, Bruce said, sitting still, sitting quietly, unwilling to shift his cramped body for fear of disturbing her. Any breath may be her last one.
He bent his head on his hand and let himself slump, tired, ready to fall asleep but fighting sleep and hating his tiredness because they were treachery, because she was dying now, tonight. At any minute the worn heart might go, the breathing shiver to a stop.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain Page 68
