“Are what?” One more time.
“Pistols.”
Tillie had long ago wearied of popular psychology (a fifty-year-old neighbor greeting with outflung arms all the women coming to see his wife laid out at the local undertaker’s was by consensus said to be in shock), and at this point she decided to wind the interview up. She told Miss Lund that she, too, was civilized (how Grandma Shilepsky would have torn her hair out at that!), and that she relied on the girl’s intelligence and good taste to decide for herself whether or not she would continue to see “Peter” in the city, for long lunches or short, or in the putative overtime lately become a frequent thing. Then she gathered up her bag and gloves.
“Wait.”
Miss Lund had a curiosity Mrs. Seltzer would understand and forgive.
“Did you know what he was like before you married him?”
“Certainly.”
“Then why did you marry him and why do you want to stay married to him?”
“Because he’s a pistol,” she flung amiably down over her shoulder, and walked out of the tavern, remembering, as she did so, that she had good legs. Several women had told her so.
Driving the five miles home, she felt like the heroine in a Pirandello play for whom a character is one thing while, to another, he is something else altogether, and so on, the conflicting versions between them offering some cumulative sense of the fluidity of human nature and the relativity of truth. She wondered whether Miss Lund’s beautiful blonde truth could ever become hers by an incantatory repetition of “Peter,” so new to her vocabulary. She remembered how on her first hearing that he was called Pete the name had had the ring of a mot juste. Would he become Peter if she treated him as though he were, shedding at last, by life’s unresting sea, the grosser shell of Pete? There was a play about that too, of somewhat more primitive grain than Pirandello’s, called The Passing of the Third Floor Back. An infinitely understanding Christ-like central protagonist makes people what they might be simply by pretending that they are. Thus the dishonest landlady becomes honest, the painted lady modest, and so on, till some improvement in the overall human lot is discernible by the time the curtain falls on act three. Tillie now a little desperately but also hypnotically repeated “Peter, Peter” all the way home, trying to resist its more grotesque implications and holding firmly in focus the sensitive and faithful gentleman evoked by the name, and trying not to laugh throughout the incantation. That was important too. “Peter,” she whispered one last time as she coasted into the garage and shut the motor off.
The strains of Twelfth Street Rag greeted her as she entered the house. Peter (Oh, my God) was playing it for Charlie, who sat nearby in his playpen, banging a metal toy against the bars of his prison, if not in time to the music, then at least with a rollicking sense of its zest. He jiggled up and down, like a rider on horseback, and saliva ran down his chin as he grinned, his lower front teeth showing, like two grains of rice. She changed her incantation. “He’s a good father, he’s a good father,” she repeated to herself, then and in the months, even the years, to come.
For what Tillie had told Miss Lund proved clairvoyant. Fresh traces of infidelity continued to arrive, whether direct or indirect. He came home late, or he stayed in town overnight. What was the motivation of his light o’ loves? Did he elicit in them the maternal instinct admittedly aroused in her so early on? Or were they simply the female half of that irreducible fraction of mankind not geared to monogamy, whose radar was always out for the signals given off by their untamable counterparts—the glance solicited and held, the smile caught like a moth on the wing and subtly detained, the touch tried and returned?
Tillie’s own maternal instinct had, in any case, by now evaporated. Who could mother such a child?
Five
Life, though it was henceforth to deal Tillie her share of dark clouds, copiously rewarded her search for silver linings. It saw that she suffered no want of bright sides. Was Pete unable to pass up anything in skirts? Neither did his devotion to her ever sway or flag. Had she to be satisfied with double talk, and never so much as when he spoke the King’s English? There was still more between them than in many of the “meaningful dialogues” supposedly going on all around them, which often rose to pitches unknown to them. He never raised his voice to her. He never uttered a harsh word. He hadn’t, as her mother put it, a malicious bone in his body. He was the kindest man she knew. He ridiculed everything—and nobody. And was he, finally, a child? It made him the perfect playmate for Charlie’s early years. And—the blackest cloud or the most silver of linings—it was in time made manifest that the boy would have no other. He would only have a childhood.
At nine he fell ill with something for which certain laboratory tests seemed, at last, best. When Dr. Willett called to say he had the results, and would be by to report them, Tillie knew what they were. A happier outcome could have been given over the phone. This, then, was the hour for which she had known all along that she was being groomed by premonition. A malevolence was cruising in the child’s bloodstream. A year of life remained to him at most, no more, probably less. He would never need a father. A playmate was enough.
When the doctor had dealt his blow, he bent to kiss Tillie on the cheek, almost ceremoniously, as brides are kissed, then as ceremoniously turned and shook hands with Pete, who saw him to the door. It was a lesson in form, a reminder that the suffering at hand and grief to come were private matters, not for public consumption.
Tillie sat staring at the living room floor, tracing idiotically the convolutions in the carpet pattern, listening to the low exchange of voices in the driveway and then the doctor’s car driving off, wondering when the fantasy into which she had been sucked would disperse. The hospital would call to say that an error had been discovered in the laboratory technician’s report, that the diagnosis was mistaken. She would momentarily awaken in her own bed to find this was all a dream. But it remained a dream from which she did not awaken. Pete came back in as far as the living room doorway, and stood there. What was generated, now, was a weird sense of embarrassment. There was no other word for it. Not turning to look at him directly, she could see him stoop to smooth a rug, and then straighten up again. He put his hands in his hind pockets and cleared his throat. “Well.”
Two people cannot share grief. She was to formulate that later to herself, but she discovered it then without making the actual notation. Doomed to go on performing the motions of reality in a phantom world, they were phantoms to one another, curiously stripped of all recognizable characteristics and negotiable qualities. They had been picked up and deposited in some country where their currency was foreign and their language alien. It was a kingdom as mythical as Graustark.
Upstairs Prince Charlie lay transfigured. You would not dare to touch him now, he was that holy. He was a phantom too. Because of the sacred obligation of deception laid upon her, she could no longer embrace him as she might wish, for fear of giving the truth away. He must never know, or be let suspect. Thus a secrecy like that of her pregnancy again closed around her. She would bear his death as she had his birth—alone with him. She would see him out of this life as she had seen him into it. From this Pete must already sense a subtle exclusion.
She could feel a ring tighten and close around her, insubstantial as mist yet hard as steel. The ghostly unreality grew, swelled the house, threatened soundlessly to shatter the windows and burst the walls. She would not have been surprised to see an angel sweep in, to make her some kind of formal Annunciation, or to ignore her and instead touch the boy with his burning coal. She and Pete were locked in an Absurdity as complete as could be imagined. The constraint between them was as palpable as if they had quarreled. They avoided one another’s eyes, as if chagrined. She never compared notes with Pete about it, but her sensation upon hearing the outrage which she must digest was shame—the impotent infuriated shame of victims whom swindlers have wiped out. The whole thing was a scandal.
But of course the immedi
ate problem was not of communicating between themselves, but with Charlie. A face had to be put on matters, a technique of deception scrupulously adhered to. She began domestically scolding Pete. “When are you ever going to take down those storm windows and put up the screens?” she said. “Or practice your piano. Go on, let’s hear how you’re coming along with your new piece.”
Pete had been trying to expand his repertoire, as far as that was possible in the ragtime tradition within which he was rather rigidly locked, and within further limits of having to play by ear. He had learned Kitten on the Keys and Nola, and was at present working on Chattanooga Choo Choo. She motioned for him to sit down at the piano in order to effect a casual, business-as-usual atmosphere, and it was to the strains of Chattanooga Choo Choo, somewhat raggedly picked out behind her, that she mounted the stairs, pulling herself up slowly by the banister. She still had no idea what she was going to say. What would her first words as Niobe be?
Charlie was sitting propped up on two pillows, trying to work a puzzle. It was the two entangled nails of which the object is to pull them apart. He sighed as she entered and threw the puzzle across the room. Now he put his hands together and looked over at her with an inquiring expression. He cleared his throat but said nothing.
“Well, how would you like some boiled thripples with almagoody sauce for lunch?” she said. “I always think they’re good this time of year.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“He says your blood is homogenized or something, from that attack of flu. You need building up is the main thing, because you really are run-down. If you must know it’s something called post-infhienzal debility. Sounds like something Pete made up. But the thing is, he gave me a prescription for some medicine that’s going to pick you up like a shot, now that we know what it is. You’ll be out of that bed inside of a week, and we can begin thinking about that trip.”
“When is Pete’s vacation?”
“Couple of weeks.” It hadn’t been decided yet, but she picked the time at which the doctor had assured her the first remission—of whatever duration—might be expected from the medication prescribed.
The music below ended in a sudden crash, as though the player had brought his two fists violently down on the keyboard. The sound reverberated through the house, in echoes of jangled strings. Tillie swiftly closed the door and came back in and sat down on the bed.
“Look,” she said, lowering her voice, “how would you like to take some kind of music lessons? That sound you just heard will show you how frustrated grownups get when they can’t play an instrument the way they’d like. I guarantee you that if you don’t learn to play something you’ll have the same regret, like I have about the violin. Oh, how I wish my parents had made me keep at it when I was young. That’s the time to. Why don’t we ask Mrs. Ditwielder if she can give you piano lessons? You’ve got rhythm in your system, and you know where you got it.”
Its source was also that of the thick yellow hair through which Charlie scratched his head, as of the inherited grin with which he now regarded her from the pillow. “You mean I could play in a cathouse like Pete always wanted to?”
“What’s a cathouse?”
“A joint like a saloon or something where they stay up all night and raise hell.”
“Playing all those jazz instruments that made caterwauling noises. Like a cat. That’s where the term comes from. But if that’s the ambition a father inspires in his son, it’s plain who needs the discipline.” She opened the door again and called down in her “schoolmarm” tone, “Peter. Peter! Will you step into the principal’s office please.”
The comedy, she saw, had only begun. Charlie was kept safe in a world of nonsense. No harm could come to him there. Never had a boy’s father more completely waived the paternal role for a fraternal one. They were quite literally playmates. Tillie had indeed two boys to deal with. They collaborated on pranks, some on her, the most ambitious a complex and prolonged trick on a next-door neighbor named Mr. Tucker.
Tucker had an obsession common among American motorists, the mileage they get out of their cars. Pete did not think much of practical jokes as a general rule, but Charlie did, and he joined in to keep him amused. Tucker, in any case, with his solemnly kept purchase records and speedometer notations, asked for it. The car in question was a Volkswagen, a second car which he kept outside on the driveway. Pete and Charlie stole across the yard under cover of night, dragging a can of gasoline, and secretly refueled it. A few nights later they repeated the transfusion, then again, adding now a gallon, now two. The result was that Mr. Tucker glowed with a pride of ownership rarely before experienced. He went around boasting of getting forty, fifty, and even up to sixty miles a gallon.
“Maybe there’s something wrong with it,” Pete said with a straight face when Mr. Tucker buttonholed him to extol the car’s merits.
When this had gone on for several weeks, he and Charlie suddenly reversed the procedure. Up the hill separating the two properties they now crept with a bucket and a length of rubber hose, and began siphoning gasoline out of the tank. The abrupt drop in the car’s performance now had Mr. Tucker going around in utter bafflement and confusion, scratching his head over charts over which he had once gloated, checking and rechecking his figures and also the fuel gauge, spreading, among garage folk, a wake of bewilderment second only to his own. Mechanics spent long periods with their heads under the hood, only to pull them out again, shaking them. Filling station attendants were challenged as to the accuracy of their pumps; brands of gasoline were switched, as well as octane strengths—all to no avail.
The Seltzers heard all about it one Sunday afternoon when the Tuckers had them in for drinks. Pete looked down at the figures in Mr. Tucker’s hand, shaking his own head as he drew on the pipe he had taken up and murmuring “Hm’s” of consternation. Charlie sat turned on the sofa, looking out of the window with his fist in his mouth. Strolling back to his own chair, Pete reminded them of the almost human perversity of which machinery was capable, quoting someone’s phrase about “the total depravity of inanimate objects.”
“We’ve got an electric percolator that brews absolutely marvelous coffee one morning,” he said, “and the next morning it tastes like snoxmethyl.”
Or gasoline, Tillie thought to herself, remembering Pete sliding home to her down the hill, still spitting out the mouthful you had to suck through the hose to get it started, Charlie clutching the paraphernalia and choking with hysterics. Pete showed the wear and tear of the dedicated craftsman, someone bent on doing something really fine of its kind. His kisses smelled of petrol. When the joke had gone on long enough, and they all decided to call it off, Tillie thought Mr. Tucker should be left with some hint of explanation.
“Maybe somebody’s been monkeying with your fuel tank,” she said, by now feeling sorry for him, and even for the Volkswagen people, in whose side he had become a famous thorn. He would turn up there alternately beaming with pleasure and fuming with indignation—a Dissatisfied Customer if they ever saw one, possibly even on his way to becoming one of those cranks, also in the American grain, who ride around with signs on their cars publicly declaring them to be lemons and where they had been bought. It would be ironic if importers of a foreign make ran foul of one, though poetically appropriate as a pitfall of the native market.
“What do you mean?” Mr. Tucker asked.
“As a joke. Putting it in and taking it out. I mean the spread between twenty-two miles and sixty to the gallon is just too much, Mr. Tucker.”
“A joke! I wouldn’t think that was very funny. That wouldn’t be my idea of humor, or Milly’s here either,” said Mr. Tucker, who always spoke for both himself and his wife.
Their month’s vacation, hastily arranged when it was certain that the remission was a solid one, was spent crossing the country in a new car of their own. The trip was all horseplay. In one restaurant, Pete summoned the head-waiter to complain that there was a sardine in his food. He posed as a gourmet
, dropping hints that he was not just any Feinschmecker, but represented a Belly Baedeker with power of life and death over such establishments. In a motel, they pretended to be plainclothesmen in pursuit of wanted convicts, in another, on the lam themselves.
Tillie joined in the sport, at least as a smiling witness, but, once home again in the house they were not long to share, she gave way. She walked in the garden in the cool of the evening, awaiting the coming of the Lord. There had been a sudden summer shower, leaving everything a fresh and brilliant green. The smell of honeysuckle haunted the air. Birds fluted in the dripping trees. A pair of lovers walked by along the road, hand in hand. She looked up at the sky, and, parting her hands in the gentlest of protests, said, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” A thin moon cleared the darkening trees. She wandered in circles, passing under a bedroom window through which drifted the sound of Pete reading to the boy, then an exchange of low, conspiratorial laughter. They were cooking something up.
Suddenly she gave in to a burst of rage. She cursed and blasphemed, reviling the name of God and all the members of the Trinity individually. She heaped abuse upon the mother of Christ, in a stream of language so obscene that she later recoiled in horror from the memory of it. Grief for a child is enough; mourning for one still alive will strain the fabric of sanity.
She was destined to give way to these convulsions periodically, however regularly they alternated with contrition, or at least amazement. She would prepare for them, plan them, anticipating some break in her household chores that would give her an hour free with the Scotch bottle, and the resulting purgative. What Pete did to get it out of his system, if anything, she never knew. They bore their trouble separately. It was never discussed. He let her weep alone at night, having found that best. Once when he found her sobbing in bed he lay down and slipped an arm around her, but some similarity to the first rough overtures of love touched a resentful chord, and she moved away. Is comfort impossible because we refuse it, or do we refuse it because it is vain?
The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels Page 21
