To this my mother paid tribute in the way most natural to her. She made a dress, concealing its execution over many weeks and using no fittings but the dressmaker’s eye. And months later, on the evening when Mr. Demuth telephoned to tell me, almost incoherently, that I had been offered not one scholarship but two, my mother sent word to Miss Pridden, with whom she normally never communicated between visits, saying that we wished to see her that same evening. And for the first time she insisted that I accompany her there. Courtesy demanded, she said, that Miss Pridden hear the news from no one but us, and even perhaps—here her voice faltered in self-denial—that I go there alone. I would have done so, for by now I wanted to see the house again, in the same way that a man wants to encounter a girl he has once been in love with, to savor—now that the worst is over—a martyrdom on which he may safely gormandize. But when she brought out the long box for me to take, and diffidently told me what was in it, I refused. So it was after all I who accompanied her.
And so, of course, the house did not look the same. It was nether and flat, a burst secret. I could have asked to go alone into the library, but I was experiencing what the grown man does over and over and already shielding myself, as he does, from the acceptance of it—that the mystery he imputes to a house, a body, a town, that when exhausted will impute itself willfully forward to other houses, bodies, towns—is nothing but the rictus of his own mystery.
It seemed to me too, hanging behind my mother, that she presented my news and her box in almost the same moment, and that in their reception they were inextricably jumbled together. Then Miss Pridden withdrew to some inner room, and came out wearing the dress. I can see her in it now—she, the dress and the house all concluding—for during her lifetime I did not go there again.
It was a dress made of some narrow, quiet stuff in an in-between color, whose unpatterned surface my mother had worked with an infinitude of the fine ribbing she had learned in France, leaving it faintly crushed yet vertical. That is all I recall of it. Like most chefs d’oeuvre, it left a total impression—in this case that it recognized its wearer and made her recognizable as she stood here, in her house.
“It suits me, Dora,” said Miss Pridden. “See how it suits me. I can wear it to the yearly dinner. I can be buried in it.” She went to a picture that hung on the wall and peered at herself in its dim, landscaped glass, although a long mirror of her aunt’s hung nearby. I can still see her doing that, her epitome—not aspiring to the mirror. “I was worried about that, you know. But this is suitable to any occasion. And now I can be.”
“I did not mean to put that into it,” said my mother. But she had. Even I could see this, that attired in such a dress, any wearer it suited might go to meet either her archivists or her maker—comfortably prejudged. The dress was a triumph of class distinction. Certainly my mother never made anything like it for anyone here. Into it she had sewn her tribute, via Miss Pridden, to all those other meek curators of carp.
I saw too that my mother, in so truly taking Miss Pridden’s measure, had as humbly given her own. So I slipped out and left the three of them together—my mother, Miss Pridden, and the house. They knew their place. I still had to find mine.
Chapter IV. My Uncle. The Name.
NOW MY UNCLE COMES forward. He moves into my life like one of those marionettes kept waiting in the wings, who come out upon the stage with jerky dutiful articulation, yet I never knew the nature of the string that dangled him. His name was George Higby. He was one of the few people about whom I never was curious. He was one of those men about whom one is incurious even when one lives with them; even long after, I can see only that now and then, stepping on some floe congealed out of passivity, he moved. There was no way to tell whether he was slow or smart, or much of anything about him, even by examining the negatives of what he was not. One could say that he did not give in particularly to drink or to abstinence, that he accepted the company either of others or of himself without distaste or relish, that he did not appear to be profoundly disinterested in life, or to bear death any grudge. He was hardy, but with the physical economy of a man whose nose never dripped, whose skin never scaled, as if he had enough marrow for circumstance, but none for waste. Originally from one of those northern counties of England where men immemorially knew about cloth—a great-granduncle had been in the Luddite riots—one could not say of him that he was northern enough to be dour, or yet that he would not riot. He had no grease-monkey gaiety with mechanisms, but sometimes, as he walked past the placidly flashing multiples of the power looms, he touched them the way the Chinese touch the abacus. Looking at him in a crowd, one would never particularly choose him as a man who had emigrated once, married twice. He was a man without effluence. What he liked, if he suffered, no man knew. Yet, sometimes, he moved.
People like him press as quietly on the lives of others as the status quo presses on us all. One never knows whether they themselves know that gravitation is on their side. He would have had what he wanted from me, except for accident. I laughed with incredulity when I first heard what he wanted, but now I do not laugh, wondering only how the image of a wish rises in the mind of such a man, a man so locked in the quotidian. As he walks steadily to and fro in the narrow environ of his needs, does he find one evening that image on his doorstep, curled like a child in a crèche? Or are they pressed too, these people so bereft of expression? Do they manage without a sound, without a sigh, in stifled breaths from day to day? He wanted me to change my name to his.
“Both?” I said. “Or would he make do with the last one!”
“Both, if you will, he says,” said my mother. “But only, as he says, ‘for the record.’ We would not need to call you ‘George’ among us. But he would like it to be both, I know that.”
She had nothing in her hands that day—she had come into my room without scissors, needle or selvage to guide them—and they clasped nervously. “But the last one would do beautifully.” And when I laughed: “There is nothing to laugh at. I am quite happy to be known by it.” And when I was silent: “Child,” she said. “He asks so little. And so seldom.”
Characteristically, he had not asked me, and in all those dragging months in the tight, three-cornered arena of that house, he never once mentioned it. Only after he had failed, in the brief time before I left, when it was broken to him that I had changed my name, but not to his—did we ever speak of it directly between us.
It was May when it began, and I was not due to go to the college in New York until September. There I had been offered two scholarships, one to be in residence, and if I kept up my grades, I would not need to be dependent on my family for anything. But my mother did not make it a question of money. For now she, who had always been so honorable in her home, who had always so diffidently abstained from those raw strategies with which members of a real family cheapen and flay each other, yet find relief—began to nag. She had given my uncle herself, but her short, slapped experience with my father may well have humbled her into feeling that, from her, this was not enough. There were the nights behind their door—I too know well that rush of gratitude we have, after long starvation, toward even the stranger who restores us to pleasure. In her pride at learning she had something else he wanted, she gratefully would have given him me. And tried to give him to me, in the way people vainly try to give those they love to one another. For she may have loved him. I must remember, when I ascribe motives to people, how chary I am of ascribing the motive of love.
And in the end she wore me down.
“What would I get out of it?” I said. “I shall want nothing from him.”
She was silent. We did not speak of fathers in that household. But that day I meant to. I was cocky for more reasons than one. Escape, for one thing, was sure, and I relaxed in the prospect. My confidence was rising. It was a time when, if accident had brought the right company, I could have poured out my secrets, the small stock of them, like anyone else, and gone on to a life of conventional secrets, like anybody else. I wa
s open to it. But accident, in the form of my uncle, and a lesson in German, inched me back along the way I had been tending. I put no blame on my uncle, poor man, so suddenly open, like me, to wasting his marrow, and as quickly closed. I merely bow to his leverage, remarking how each of us pulls his weight in this life, even when he stands still. I was his accident.
“And what will he get out of it?” I said. “He can’t think he’ll make a son out of me.” Here was the other reason for my cockiness. I was eighteen now, and although I stayed clear of the girls in Tuscana, it was only because I no longer wished to know anyone there. But from the giggling whispers on the bus, the overtures the more forward ones had made, I already sensed that I would be a success with women when I chose. This was one confidence I never had to acquire—the sexual one. It was justified—in the first moment of the ballet I learned to dance. And I would choose soon, I told myself; the North held out that presto-chango magic too. Meanwhile, I permitted myself to strut like a man before I was one, deriding my uncle as I had heard men deride each other, even themselves, for wanting a son and being without.
“I don’t look like him,” I said. “Nobody will be fooled.”
“Nor do you look like me.” She was cutting a collar out of some thick mustard-colored stuff, and the scissors went evenly round the curve.
“No I don’t, do I.” My eyes followed the scissors, and I was suddenly dead sick of all the sewing that driveled through the house and every conversation, matting every table with the undersides of femininity, with the clear tale of how any woman, fat or thin, was basted together. I wanted to be in a room with men, talking, as I had read they did, of princesses lointaines. “No,” I said, “I must look like my father,” and saw the scissors halt in their curve and slash the collar half through.
“Tell me about him.” My voice was strong. These last months I had lost the habit I had had so long, of talking low, chin tucked in the neck of my shirt.
“I knew him for a year. I’ve told you—all I knew of him.” She had, and I had always thought her ashamed only of the way he died—a cavalryman kicked by one of his own charges, drunk when kicked. Now I saw that she might have been ashamed of not knowing much more, much more than I.
“Have you a picture of him? You must have. Show it to me.”
She shook her head, her hands piecing the ruined collar together, but she was staring at me as if I were new to her, and not new. Then I was sure.
“Come to the mirror,” I said. It was the first time I had ever commanded her, used such a voice, and she obeyed me. She let me take her by the arms and raise her up, showing me the first of those small graces of submission with which a mother gives her son his masculinity, without which gift—if she does not—no woman will easily be able to give it to him later on.
We stood side by side in front of the mirror. Anyone judging us for the proportion of secrecy in our temperaments would have given the palm to her at once—to the purple-brown lights in her hair and eyes, to the drooping inclination of that small, round head, all its draughtsmanship in a few tight lines, to the hooded eyelids, convex as a bird’s. Yet, reticent as she was, quiet as she was, anyone who knew her well could see clearly almost every thought she had. I looked into the mirror, that box of gray gleams collected by some impossible asymmetric trick that escaped me no matter how many times Demuth coached me on the basic law of refraction, and I endeavored to look at my face, alongside hers, as a stranger would look at it.
I had been flaxen as a child, and was darkening somewhat, as many such do—my brows had changed most and were now black—but I had kept, as I still do, that aureole of frankness which surrounds the fair. My features were straight but would not be delicate; there was already a man’s thickness in the nose and chin. The mouth was less heavy, closing evenly. In repose its corners turned up, and—but only to the more than casual physiognomist—in. But it is the eyes that, more than anything, give my face its extraordinary—only because it is mine—front of frankness. They are eyes that occur more often among the Irish, very blue, the whites of which, when struck by light from the side, give it back slightly doubled, as if refracted from a thick crystal, and at some angles the eye looks as if it had a light behind the cornea itself. Such eyes are not uncommon, as I say, and when the other features are regular, their effect is to give the face the open look of a face on a calendar, an almost dull lack of concealment. Often they occur among the rather dull. Looking at me, even those who knew me might think that they could see clearly every thought I had.
I looked at myself as a dog looks at himself in the glass, seeing a possible enemy, possible friend. I put my hand under my mother’s chin as we stared at our images. “No, I don’t look like you, do I.”
“Yet you are mine.”
I put my forefinger on the glass at the center of where it reflected me. “There. There he is, isn’t he?” I said. “Why should I not keep his name?”
Her eyes stared into mine. “He died before you were born,” she said, and left the mirror.
Bending over the table, she began smoothing the yellow material in order to cut a new collar. I picked up the ruined one.
“Nasty color,” I said. “Color of turd.”
Once or twice, recently, she had chid me for using the kind of language we did not use. But this time, unexpectedly, she smiled. “Mrs. Thwaites,” she said. “Some women try to match their complexions. Always the wrong ones.” She glanced up at me, sideways, almost flirting, a faint flush rallying her cheek. “Mind you pick a girl with no green to her skin. Else you’ll have to live with such colors the year round.”
She had never spoken to me like that before, acknowledging my growth. Through me, she bridled at the memory of having been chosen by a man who, though he may have deceived her, had been sought by women. And taking sides against her own sex, as women will for their sons, she found a sly satisfaction in thinking that I too would be good with the girls.
But after that, in the sessions that went on day after day, she took warning and would not allow me the privilege of argument. She became the exhorter and I once again the listening child. Moral issues flew round my head like succubi, and I learned what dialecticians parents can become, what evangels, when they want a child’s salvation for the sake of their own. She took every advantage except one. And that was the one which overcame me.
Whenever she spoke of my uncle now—yes, she must have loved him, for how could anyone sense the inner drama of such a man except in love?—the phrase she had first used of him recurred: “He asks so little. And so seldom.” And one day, just after she had left the room in angry misery, with those words upon her lips, I heard in them the reverberation of the one word she had not used. “I ask so little.” That night, tossing, I heard the phrase in all its variations—She asks so seldom. She asks so little. And the next day I gave in.
Assuming a new name is not as difficult as some might think it. For the innocent, it is made easy. If I remember the law correctly, it is necessary only to declare that one has no debts that would vanish with the old name, no fraudulent purpose, and those of us who feel pure enough in heart to say this now, or to confront the possible burden of proving it later, need not even seek the comforting acquiescence of the courts. My mother, however, knew of course that my uncle would want things as legal as possible, needed to hold, hot and neat in his hand, the intangible—that is what people go to lawyers for.
The one lawyer in town was also the judge, a man whose name—Hannibal Fourchette—I somehow produced effortlessly for my mother when she asked it, conscious that it had some familiarity for me connected neither with the fact that it was current, or odd. Mr. Fourchette—as we learned he was addressed during his attorney hours—was a black-haired Creole in his seventies (some said the hair was dyed), who ran his office without a permanent secretary, with the aid of a fifty-year-old son who looked almost contemporary with his father, but, unlike him, was always red, and breathing of anise by noon. The senior Fourchette was one of those me
n, neither broken nor bent, who nevertheless give the impression of having descended. One felt that just as he seemed more than his son, so he must have slipped from fathers who had been more than he. Their breath was still on him, the way anise was always on his son’s, and one could imagine that it had long since dictated his place in life, causing him to settle in some place where he could still command from his inferiors an authority that he had not quite been able to retain with his peers. Later on, when I knew a little more about the hierarchies of the South, I understood better the possible nature of a descent from Louisiana to Tuscana.
We learned from him that the business at hand was cursory. We must petition the court for the change, offering the proper statements of no intent to deceive, my mother to make the petition in my name. We must offer some corroboration, birth certificates or the like, in token that I was the person I purported to be. He inquired whether we had them. We did, but when he heard that I was an alien, he deliberated for a moment, passed his hand vaguely over the backs of some thick, calfbound books on a short shelf behind him, opened and shut a drawer in a wooden filing case. There was some legal exemption concerning name changes for aliens, he thought he recalled—possibly it pertained only to translation, or at the time of entrance into the country. But in any case, it would be wiser for us to take due process, he said, meanwhile covering a yawn with two fingers of a ringed hand. It was plain that our doing so would save him from having to trace what the technicality was. I never found out what it was, or needed to, but at the time I wondered why an alien was exempted from the procedure for natives, whether it was because he was considered to be nobody when he came and only somebody thereafter—or vice versa. Meanwhile my mother kept nodding, and when he had finished, asked about the fee. Seventy-five dollars—she could pay that? He called her “ma’am.” Fifteen pounds, she said to herself, and nodded. She meant, I knew, to pay it out of her own savings.
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