What did it mean? What kind of a sinner was Allison? Had she made herself a graven image? And if so, how deep into neolithic slime, primordial mud, how high on a golden holy bough, did she bury or display a big blond phallus? Of Homer, her man? Was that is? Is it a religious frenzy that heightens the colour in her cheeks and are the stabbing pains in her loins the aftermath of a woodland orgy, continuous intercourse with a god, unbearable pleasure in a leafy glen, with leopards’ eyes for lanterns to light them, perhaps? Allison’s sex life is anybody’s guess and her sin conjectural. It is certainly no one’s business whether Homer’s attacks on her body at regular intervals pleased or displeased her. It has been pointed out that Homer didn’t talk—well, Allison couldn’t be reached. Allison was the unpossessable woman. Homer, in his wildest dreams, could not probe his Allison, we have no way of knowing if it confused or fretted him. Physically, he appeared to be satisfied, and mentally, he appeared to ask no questions; certainly no questions that might reflect on his own prowess which was not to be questioned. But this is Allison’s chapter and Allison’s slim body was deeper than a deep well; it was a pleasure-giving and pleasure-receiving vessel, but it was bottomless, and neither could Allison’s spirit be pinned to the wall like the hired man’s butterflies. In any event, it seemed, the sex life of Allison and Homer, to be a sort of blind bargain and no complaints from either party were ever registered anywhere. It is not too surprising that Allison, accused, as a fastidious and dreamy girl, of searching for a white knight, should have married a blond bull. Graceful and slim as Homer was at twenty, with hair that glittered in the sun like burning leaves, Allison, tiptoeing among the eligible and eager lovers in Havermeyer County, chose him without faltering. He was the one who did not move, who said nothing, who waited, or so it seemed to her, to be loved; who would least resist her imagination, cause the least breakage of the pretty things, the rococo décor, that encircled her mind like a frieze. But of this last point she was, of course, unaware; she had no possible way of knowing, even intuitively, how easily Homer was satisfied, how little he would ever ask of a woman, how incurious he was, how completely wrapped up in himself. Oddly enough, her choice was good, in the sense that Allison would have driven a more sensitive lover out of his mind with a feeling of unfulfilled desire for an unpossessable woman, whose thoughts he could not fathom, whose imaginings tantalized him, whose elusiveness tricked him—and Homer, well, almost any other intelligent woman with a pretty body and a warm heart and a responsive set of nerve endings would have left Homer in a week, or have taken another lover in two. Well matched, Allison would have had the sort of man who makes a business of love, at least who has no business elsewhere. One has read of such but they are not listed in Dun and Bradstreet. Nipped in the bud then, to carry this possibility which didn’t happen a little further, Allison’s already flowering daydreams, her visions, her beliefs, her very ethics would have given way, and no longer solitary, the man we have ourselves made up would have made her deliriously and touchingly happy and perhaps possessable, which is doubtful.
Well, that summer, that long and leafy summer in 19—, when it didn’t rain for ninety days and the sun shone almost as if disintegrated, without shadows, in a brilliant sky, and the young women and lads turned brown all over and made love from morning till night, swimming and playing tennis and dancing, turning their bodies round and round to be looked at, and calling out to each other in flute-like voices, all such a pretty love ceremony that seemed never ending and inexhaustible, the five L’Hommedieu brothers were every one of them single.
As identical as gingerbread men, who had placed so lovingly the raisins in their eyes? And didn’t it take a brave cook, one without shame, to add, between their legs, the elegant three-cornered symbol of immortality? Flora? Never! Flora longed for just one poet and would have gladly castrated the lot of them for one line that scanned. She had been, and she resented it, merely the vehicle, the covered bridge, she thought, and as she sat on the side lines that bright blue summer, she watched indifferently the handsome young men she had harboured easily vaulting the tennis nets and diving from the highest boards into the Bay, who had inherited only her husband’s anatomy and only her own speechlessness. And the good doctor, not so much interested in poetry as hygiene, had put an end to her dreams with his clever snippings, devitalized for good, poor Flora. She did not look up when Allison, her eyes as dark as lawn mushrooms underneath and as big and as infinitely divisible into segments as their softly breathing gills are (wouldn’t she have been the one to notice?), whispered to her, “Mother?”
“May I call you Mother?” whispered Allison.
The night before, between dances, she had led Homer out into the dark and placed herself evenly between his arms. She had put up her face and murmured passionate little short half-sentences, and Homer had kissed her hard and thirstily on the mouth. She did it herself, Homer was hers, she never doubted him. No one knows why, of the five, she chose him; could it have been his name, that would come to nothing?
“You may, dear.”
The two dream girls did not recognize each other, neither glimpsed the visions in the other’s head, and Homer, taciturn and laconic, deeply anaesthetized by his burning desire for the lovely Allison, passed, as it were, from the loins of one to the loins of the other without any measurable trauma. Perhaps Millie, the village queen with the sweet tooth, had helped in that transition, and what Allison didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. For twenty years she lived and slept with the only person of her acquaintance that her divining eye, by some peculiar deviation, some stubborn blindness, could not, at least did not, penetrate. It looked as if Allison’s intuition, by Allison herself, had been subdued like a little dog, whose barking kept her awake and, well trained, only nosed out the hidden things that his mistress pointed out to him first.
Homer looked straight at his wife sitting in bed reading her book, her cheeks still bright, her hair a little damp at the temples.
“Yes?” She looked up, feeling his look, placing one finger on the page in her book, the middle of the sentence he interrupted.
“I’m running over to Jim’s to get some accounts. I’ll be,” he looked at his watch, “exactly an hour.”
And that’s exactly how long it took at Miss Webber’s, the little telephone operator past thirty who squinted, counting a fifteen-minute walk each way.
It is incredible that Allison could miss “that look,” both before and after, that the least suspicious of wives recognize, but all that can be said is—she gave no sign and felt no pain.
Chapter V
The Holy Bum
Victorine inherited her mother’s sex, her mother’s face, her mother’s ability to daydream, but whether her will would ever equal the strength, or her visions, the intensity, of Allison’s, remains to be seen. Her age was against her, she lacked confidence, her ego had not yet emerged, as it were; it struggled to be free, to identify itself, but it lay panting in the dark, gasping for air, as if in a cocoon. She had, however, a poise (like Allison’s, too) beyond her years, a sort of balance and know-how that kept even those who were closest to her from suspecting the almost elemental darkness of her little soul, her fears, her hypersensitivity to light, her distaste for noise, her panics. And Misael, the purest companionship she would ever have, she had cast him off. Too intimately identified with sin, too conditioned, one might say, along with herself, to evil, thinking of him, perhaps, as another dearly loved and idolized self, she wished to sacrifice him, cut herself in two. And Heaven knows that the sanctified, if she is in error, have practised, in reality, this same self-mutilation. Not alone and in ignorance, like Victorine, but sustained by saints and nourished by the dogma. Victorine, without portfolio, without logic, but with a powerful precedent, unmanned herself. The big and guilty sin of childhood, self-indulgence, Victorine recognized correctly perhaps as sex; it is hard to say, when the word itself was unspoken, and as no one, either, had ever told her that sex, if it was sex, was evil, the whole arg
ument falls to pieces. It simply looks as if Victorine was unusually conscious of that knowledge of evil, that grave offence, that seems to be born with each and every one of us; only way back some impatient theologian, fed up with abstractions, and tired of reasoning, pointed out the zones of pleasure on the human body and said, “This is it; this is sin.” In any event, Misael no longer runs naked in the woods with Victorine or slips soundlessly into the lake to swim by her side; he is in that glass menagerie now, the first of Victorine’s treasures to be placed on the top shelf, and he wears, in one of his poses, a little fig leaf like Apollo, and in another, a pale blue diaper, like the infant Jesus. (“I will not speak to him again.”) But he has crystallized, nevertheless, perhaps because. Artless, really an ingénue, naïve, she meant it when she said, “I will not do it,” “I shall not speak to him again.” She did not suspect the cunning devices, the devious disguises of evil, or her own inclination towards the almost predisposition, for, the dark, the secret, the mystic, the nameless, and she had a silly faith, because it was absurd, in her little self. Hail and farewell, Misael.
And Joe, too, attractive to her senses, she began to avoid. He had a kind of beauty that was for some reason taboo, associated as she felt it was with the pleasures that so fascinated her, of varying degrees of cruelty and lust: the pierced butterflies fluttered like imprisoned yellow sunlight against the dark wall of her mind, the strange bloodless dying rats suffocated her thoughts and would not set her imagination free, as if they were putty in her ears and eyes.
“Don’t look, miss!” and Joe twisted the outstretched neck of the terrorized hen, who fought and gasped and screamed and then went limp as a wash-cloth you wring out in the tub. “It can’t be helped,” said Joe, “no eggs in her,” and he flung her down amongst the other fowls who stepped over her unconcernedly as Joe considered the next victim, economy in his simple mind and blood on his hands. Neither did Victorine miss the special beauty of Joe behind the plough, his strength and guiding instinct as he talked to Tom, the big red work-horse, and timed his own gracefully shifting weight with the animal’s powerful pull, and persuaded the little plough to hew its course straight and even towards the setting orange-coloured sun. The shining horse and the strong graceful man she saw were beautiful but she saw it clear and unclouded and her heart beat no faster, her eyes did not darken, her senses remained quiescent.
“Well, miss, another day is done,” said Joe.
It was as if Joe had turned a page in a book; Victorine saw him do it.
“Joe?”
“Yes.”
“Are there three hundred and sixty-five days in a year?”
“Yes, miss, but they’re not all working days.” Had Joe, too, seen the book of his labours, and was he really keeping track of the pages?
Victorine stared at him, but the tiny visual analogy hadn’t lasted a split second, she saw the clear round drops of sweat, like tears, sliding down Joe’s brown neck into the opening of his shirt, and part of his shining chest; a button off his shirt, she saw a semicircular wedge of his belly, the skin surprisingly white and transparent like a woman’s; his blue working pants hugged his swelling thighs and revealed the profile of his muscled calves. Looking into his face, she glimpsed that brotherhood. He looked and stood at ease but his smile was secret and sweet and she felt a hard desire for him, a bodily companionship. She longed to move towards him, put her arms around his neck and kiss his face and throat, taste him, sleep with him, but it was a cloudy concept, a black instinct, wordless.
“Let’s shoot rats,” she whispered.
“Too late,” said Joe, and wasn’t it. What if she had said, “I love you”? Joe turned away, completely unaware of a severance of relations, the end of a compact, and walked around the side of the barn (Put on your old grey bonnet).
Victorine, however, felt her loss and she wept. Stretched out on her bed, she sobbed for a long time and turned impatiently from side to side. She beat the pillow and asked questions of the air, Why? Why? Why? And then she whispered fiercely to herself, No! No! No! After a while she lay still and peace came to her, the room darkened and a few big outsize drops of rain splashed against the window. She drew up her knees and with her fists clenched against her face went to sleep, in the same position as she had long ago lain, supported in amniotic fluid, in her mother’s womb.
Victorine was not one to fall back on boredom, those there’s-nothing-to-do spells, that terrible ennui that like an ulcer in the duodenum eats holes in your insides, that painful yearning, for what? What kind of food? The terrible ennui might come later but not yet. Misled by her own confidence in her ability and refreshed and off her guard after nine hours of sleep, Victorine, in an unconscious search for a hiding place to dream in, took the cinder path to the railroad tracks. She deliberately skirted the woods where the memory of Misael would tempt her into self-centred adventures, and fooled by a different mixture underfoot, a different texture in the décor, a new piece of sky, a fresh outlook I believe it is called, in less than ten minutes’ time was as out of this world as ever. She was as unprotected as she neared the gleaming tracks as she had been that day when the lightest of leaves had startled her out of her wits and a little white dog had leaped through an ordinary hedge as if through a hoop, terrorizing her. Her lips moved as if she were praying and she lifted up her palm as if to feel a drop of rain, she shook her head gently and smiled and dipped her chin as if acknowledging a greeting from one of her mother’s friends. She was in that place. But part of her listened acutely for the unexpected, the interruption of reality, the distortion of fact, her mother’s voice, her father’s footstep, and her heart fluttered with suspense, her blood sang. This was it.
She heard, but it did not startle her, a monotony of sound, she did not know when she first heard it, when it had, if at all, gently interrupted her self-centred dream. It seemed to parallel, like the tracks she walked beside, her own inner monologue. But she knew herself to be silent, it could not be herself because this sound came from the outside.
Then she saw him, but again it was as if she had been coming upon him for some time and had seen him from the beginning. He sat on his heels by a tiny fire; he held a glistening newly peeled willow branch that bent with the weight of a single piece of bacon. The bacon dripped into the fire, sustaining it. He talked steadily to himself in a low monotonous but pleasing voice, a caressing voice like a melodious wind in the chimney. He, too, raised and lowered his chin, lifted a palm, shifted his weight, smiled. It was the Holy Bum.
He was not yet aware of Victorine, but as if he felt a presence, a listening, he stopped talking, the way a mouse in the panelling quits gnawing when something tells him, the very acuteness of your listening perhaps, that you are there, the enemy. The only sound was the soft hiss of the bacon dripping on the little fire. Then he spoke.
“Are you done yet?” he said to the bacon. The hissing stopped and the bacon curled up on the stick.
“You are done,” said the man, but he did not stir. He listened without moving his head, his eyes slid towards each ear in turn.
“Hello,” said Victorine pleasantly.
“Ah!” said the man as if he had been struck. The bacon fell into the blackened ash that, no longer fed by the fat, turned cold; the man fumbled for it with his fingers, and as he bent his head, Victorine saw the dark blush, the painful colouring of the guilty.
“Oh, your bacon!” said Victorine, wishing to put him at ease and she, too, bent over the cold fire hoping by mimicking his actions he would feel her understanding.
The man quickly regained his poise and ate the bacon. He had fine pointed white teeth and they shone. He looked at the child beside him and said, “You heard me?”
“No,” Victorine lied.
“Come, now!”
“Yes, a little.”
“What was I talking about?”
“I don’t know.”
“No one does,” said the man.
Victorine stared at the slight but vigorous
person she had come upon beside the tracks and tried to place him in the small gallery of people she had seen or heard about or read of. How real was he?
“You mustn’t be surprised if I talk to a strip of bacon,” said the man.
“Oh, no.”
“Did you ever talk to an apple?”
“Oh, yes,” said Victorine, but she hadn’t.
After a while the man stood up. “If you are modest,” he said, “you will look the other way, there is only one way to put out a fire properly in the woods.” Victorine, at a complete loss, turned away; she took a few steps . . . .
“You need not go,” he said, “I have finished.”
“Are you . . .” Victorine began, she had heard of bums and that’s what he must be: his jowls were blue, his clothes almost colourless from weather, a bandanna, fat with his possessions, lay on a log. And standing, he had the ambulatory slouch of the one who lives and travels on his feet, sleeps even, like a horse, upright.
“No,” said the man, “I am not.”
Victorine felt a gaiety coming over her; she giggled.
“But I haven’t asked you yet,” she said.
“You were about to ask me if I were Professor Perrault,” said the man. “Come, now, weren’t you? And I’m not. I’m a bum.”
“It must be fun,” said Victorine.
“How stupid you are,” said the bum, “nothing worth while is fun.”
Victorine Page 7
