But the present, moving to its own rough theorem, does not keep in strict equilibration with the past, as in the calculable old algebraic lunacies of Smith and Brown, who in the primers used so comfortably to navigate the world. “If Smith” (who is the present) “starts at a given point, traveling at the rate the earth goes round the sun, and Brown” (who is the past) “goes from the same point, at the same rate, in the opposite direction, the circumference of the earth being known, at what point are they likely to meet, or is Smith standing still in relation to Brown?” And what is the answer if a man, who is x, is in himself both Smith and Brown?
The answer is—that the phone rings. The answer is that bit by bit the arrogance of memory is being taken from me, the safety crumb by crumb. Up to now I have told myself that at least I am the taker, and that this is in its way a triumph. That no one can bear too long the bleat of his childhood, the blind, glaucous voice of his youth, without shame. And that I must get on to the trial, where, if the perversion began, so did the man.
But the phone rang, and I chose to listen. I will listen, I thought, long enough to find out why, of all the many there might have been to fear, I chose her.
“Pierre,” she said again, but this time there was no question in her voice, and I, who had said “Yes,” said nothing. The silence fell between us like a rest in music; we plumbed it and rested there. Then my inner dialogue began again, its shorn fugue mending. If I let the present in now, I shall never be sure where safety lies. But is that what I fear? Meanwhile I said to her, “Yes. This is Pierre.”
“I know,” she said, scarcely forming the words. I heard her breathing, hard but slowing, the râles of a child run a long way to fling itself inside a door and lean back, pressed against it, to breathe. I remembered how, long ago, claw-fingers clutching my mother’s the long way out on the Underground, my breath would go faster and faster with the wheels until it seemed as if the suction of my love would draw out of me the necessary air—until I was inside that door again, the terrible angina of absence was over, and I could breathe. And I thought how odd it was that this, on which I had never allowed myself to dwell in tenderness for myself, I remembered now in pity for her.
Before I spoke—I do not know what I would have said—she spoke.
“I am not ashamed,” she said. So she told me again what she had already said in a hundred pleading, oblique acts of submission, of favor, and what, in that one night’s grappling, she had shown me in all its nuances, shrinking and bold—but had never said in so many words. There are women from whose lips, true as any, the three simple words—the declaration—break continuously, like three golden bubbles, as if they had a fountain of such constantly forming, springing golden from inside. And there are others, like her, who can do everything but speak them, who have tongues witty and easy for all but this. Who send instead mute gifts selected with the perfect stroke of adoration, letters built in the careful, flat planes of friendship, as cunningly as a house of cards which the breeze from that one triplet of words would make fall. And who, when they give someone the strange, mute gift of themselves, do so with lovely simplicity, feeding him with their fingers, opening their nudity to him with quiet laughter, pressing their faces against his secret flesh, his against theirs, in a streaming abandonment of mouths and hands and hair. But for whom, as for some men, as for me, nothing of the flesh is as bare as the certain nudity of words.
“I am not ashamed,” she said to me, with the sadness of declaration. Not, she was saying to me, of that night either because it had been or had been only one, nor of letting me see what all the nights between had been, nor of coming to me, along the filament, here. And I thought that her face, if I could see it, would have the triste dignity of a woman who lets a last garment slip to the ground.
“I am the one to be ashamed,” I said, thinking that even if she had come, not across the wire, but taking up her blanket instead, barefoot through the four-o’clock streets, even the street-corner churls must have bowed their heads to her trouble, turning their eyes, shamed for me or themselves, aside.
“That’s all right,” she said brusquely. And as quickly, she was clothed. No, I thought to tell her, stay as you were. Else you will never approach me. And is that what I fear?
“And you?” she said. “I didn’t wake you?”
“No. I was awake.”
“I had a feeling you were. And—I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing the boats.”
Their house, my flat, are ten blocks apart north-south, and almost the same short distance west of the East River. At times, as old houses will, they vibrate like decks to the river traffic’s gliding calls. And now and then, in the foolish telephone interchange bred between incipient lovers, she and I had stopped to hear one of those long, humid blue notes simultaneously, entranced at the viability of sound, that made it possible for us to squabble metaphysically over who heard it first, and by what blended aural image of ear on phone, on phone.
“I’ve been working here nights.” I did not know how to begin. Nor, for the first time, how to leave.
“Oh. Then you aren’t … at the office these days?” Her voice was timid. Then she had not called there. Or pretends she has not, I thought, but could not persuade myself that she lied. I knew the spoor of honesty too well. If it were I, I would have called and concealed it. If she were more like me, I thought, I should have nothing to fear.
“No. I’d arranged for time off.” The next day, not before. But my tongue had already twisted the tense, reminding me how well it knew how to give nothing away. “If you called—they think I’m out of the city.”
“I—did not call.” Her words came after a pause, and I imagined her mouth as she said them, its frank lines that always expected the same of others, even of me—and I could not bear not to be honorable with it too. In the small things, I thought. That do not matter.
“I arranged for it the next day,” I said. “I’ve been doing something of my own. Something I’ve had to be alone for. I tried writing you a letter—but I couldn’t explain.” I waited for her protest but none came.
“It had nothing to do with you,” I said. Lies breed lies, I thought. But for me, the truth does it as well. Which part of me will she believe, the truth or the lie? That is part of the fear. Which.
“Then I was wrong. I thought it had. That’s why—I could call.” Her words came in a rush. “I thought—I think now I have for a long time … there’s … some part of your life you have to keep to yourself. And because we’d made love, I thought I could trespass. But I was going to tell you now … that I could … that I would—manage not to.”
The phone trembled in my hand, at my lips.
“But if I was wrong, then—” Her voice altered, retreated to the promised distance. “Then I should not have called. Then I am ashamed.”
“No. Never.” I was grateful to the mask of the phone, that let me say it, that kept her from me, from the helpless cycle of touch that would have begun again had she been here. And again there was a rest, a silence.
“Listen!” she said suddenly. And I thought—now the thread will break. And I can leave.
“Yes?” I answered. I should warn you. Only for myself.
“Not to me,” she said, as if she had heard me. “The boats. They’re beginning.”
They had begun all around us, pushing the city up toward morning, the island voices. We listened on our peculiar electronic island, on which, from a safe distance, we could breathe in unison, almost as in love. Heard by each of us through our separate windows, and doubled again through phone on phone, the chorale of the river pierced and tremored, until it seemed as if all around us sleepers must awake and join us, or must be held by the island breath of the water in a legend that endlessly lulled.
“It’s getting light here,” she said, and from a depth almost of sleep I answered, “Here too.” My head bowed against my hand, and I must have dreamed off a little, into a legend where the two of us listened neither for ourselves nor for the ot
her, but, acutely together, to the rich current as it came.
Then I awoke, but still in the spell, like someone started up from a dream of drowning, who leans back, before he opens his eyes, on his deep urge to be drowned. Perhaps, I thought, in my sleep I told her everything. From the beginning.
“Have you gone?” I said.
“No. But I can sleep now. Keep—keep well.”
The light was paling, reassembling the room. In a moment I should have to wake to it. The boats were still.
“I lied,” I said. “I was avoiding you.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ve watched you. I know how you are.”
Of course she watches. How easily I forget that others do.
“How?” I said. “What do you know?” That I never knew your brother. That I was not always Pierre, and now am never wholly who I say I am. That I, who meant to be so undispersed, so single, have played for so long with the protean gap between what is and what might be that I am almost no one at all. “What do you think I am?”
This was the longest silence. Her answer prolonged it. “Honest.”
Innocence, I thought. Beyond belief, this innocence. Can one believe it? From far below in myself, from farther off than it had ever come before, I felt a flicker of mine.
And this was what I feared. The receiver slipped from my hand to the desk, hanging soundlessly on the thick manuscript pile. How had it come about; how had it ever come about? After the first compromise, I thought, all others follow. I learned to accept that long ago. No man, after a certain age, can fail either to know this or to marvel, like a man breathing under an avalanche, that under its numb, insidious powder-weight he is still—though not the same—alive. But how does it ever come about that the return of what his maturity mourned, his youth meant to keep so savagely pure, is the one further weight he cannot bear? That I tremble in fear of what, if ever it quickened again, harsh and lovely, up from the impossible dead, I meant to greet with joy?
From the desk, the phone spoke. A broad blue stained the room, assembled now in sanity, all its bargains plain. In spite of them, in the face of them, I picked up the phone. “I lied,” I said into it. “From the beginning. I lied.”
I waited for her answer, but none came. The return is not that verbal, that easy. And perhaps before I said it, I had made sure that she was gone.
For I know now what I fear. I fear that I may trust her.
Chapter IX. A Day in 1936. Morning in Tuscana. The Courtroom. Evening at Home. He Leaves Tuscana.
ON AN AFTERNOON, THEN, late in the August of 1936, a young man and his mother could have been seen walking down the main street of a small town in Alabama, on their way to the courthouse for the granting of the petition that was to change his name. If you were a stranger in town and had idly chanced to ask who they were, either because, together in their dark clothes, they made such a clear print on the hazel afternoon, or because you, your informant and they were the only ones foolish enough to be out on the heat-stunned street at this hour, you would have been told that it was the wife of George Higby, the second foreman at Rhine’s, and her son. Rhine’s is the mill that you see for yourself, without being told, must once have drawn in every man around, but looks now like a collection of old cigar boxes at the base of a pyramid. The latter is one flank of the five-mile stretch you can see of the dams, about which you know a good deal, since this is probably the reason, via the overflow of the Denoyeville boardinghouses, that you are here at all.
It is possible that you will not even be told that the couple verging toward you are not natives of the region, for your informant, a courthouse loafer by the smell and the stubble of him, has a curious eclecticism toward out-of-the-country foreigners, for such an ill-educated man. In his long residence here, a matter of almost two hundred years now in one version of him or another, he has seen all kinds of trade and tackle—Dutchmen to Huguenots, odd Pole tailors, even a coastal seeping of Spanish—and except for an infrequent rabbling of zeal against the infidel, he has neglected all of them almost to the point of tolerance. He has little energy to spare against that kind of alien; he is a xenophobe of skin, of the special foreigners who for the last hundred years have been on his neck, outnumbering him, burrowing in his groin and making cheese of his brain, ready at any time, he is sure, to hang their bone-chant on him, doubtless stirring his soup at this moment with the white clavicles of girls. Therefore the Higbys, here only eight or nine years and a quiet sort who keep to themselves, are in a way his colleagues, though never his kin, even as you are, and he is pleased to join you both in the affable custom of the place, which is to retail, even to a stranger, the secondary gossip that will make him feel at home.
George Higby, he tells you, is expected to be chief foreman when old Blankenship steps down. The wife does high-class dressmaking on the side; the boy is hers. Neat-looking woman, he adds, as the two pass on the other side of the street, the woman plump and convex in dark blue, with her hair coifed tight over her ears, the son heads taller than she, man-size ankles jutting out of his serge “best,” walking beside her as young men do with their mothers at that age—hanging back, hands in his pockets, blond head cast down.
As they cross in front of you where you stand, in front of Semple’s store, your informer gives her a respectful nod, his eye straying to the pavement at the corner, where a sunken horse trough bears a whitewashed street name, for the exchange of cake plates is an Almanach de Gotha in the town, and he has remembered with whom she takes tea. Son’s a real scholar, they say; old Miss Pridden at the museum has got him a scholarship to New York. And here, if your accent is cooler and drier than his own, he will suddenly rein in. He has done all that politeness, to your sort, requires of him, and besides, he has noticed that Mrs. Higby and her son have not turned the corner to Pridden Street but have paused at the foot of the courthouse stairs.
“Ah-hah, New York,” he says with a spit to the side, and he waits, with a tucked-in grin, for you to declare yourself, your station, which he doubts you can do as well as he. He knows, the grin says, views supposedly held up there of certain matters down here, but excuse him if it just won’t hold water with him that under that skin you don’t secretly feel the same. In which case, his squint says, your case is pitiful, for he has seen before the unease of your sort when “they” step aside for you, or worse still, poke Uncle Tom fun at you in a way that under his hot eye and lazy nether lip they would never dare—except that they know it pleasures him to see what they think of you—a sort not born, as he is, to command. No fine talk, he knows, can give you what he has—the rested psyche of a man who from birth has had somebody handy to despise. At the moment, however, a little current of interest blows toward him from the courthouse, and he is reminded of a spectacle there that will engage him, though not, by any invitation of his, you. This is Tuscana’s business and hence his, down here where the pursuit of what happens to people is a serious and open entertainment. He ambles off to attend to it. As the proverb says, his glass is small but he drinks from his glass.
But if your accent is within even a few hundred miles of being as soft and spatulate as, his, then things are quite otherwise; the conversation begins and ends differently all the way around. Been boarding in Memphis, have you; by God, he’s known a thing or two about Memphis in his time. He sends you a look from beneath his lashes, and either from your response or from what he sees, the set of your haunches or the fleshy fold under your eyelids, he feels free to name a street that used to be wide open, a particular place, the damnedest, you’d never notice it in passing, back of a livery stable. You have been there too, and this does it—what closer fealty between strangers than the fact of having been to the same one of those? Used to be a Polish woman here, no longer; still, he’s able to give you a street and a number, even some encouraging gossip about Mrs. Emerson, with whom you currently board. And when the couple, mother and son, pass before you in their slow, dark swath along the street, he answers your idle question with information mor
e intimately slanted. Boy looks as if he’d like to be anywhere but where he is, at his mother’s elbow; from Alabama to Timbuctoo a widow mama is the same. Saw him do right well, though, in the Kid Gloves match in the new Charlotte school gym last year. Stood up against Jack Lemon’s boy, who’s old enough to vote and had no call to be there at all.
When Mrs. Higby crosses he gives her the same modest greeting, but when she is out of hearing he adds that she was Higby’s dead wife’s sister, something in the Bible about that, he isn’t sure whether for or against. Anyway, there’s been no issue of either marriage, and poor Higby is going to do the next best thing, adopt the son. Expect that this, maybe, or something akin to it, is what they’re heading to the courthouse for now. He keeps an eye on them, but you, being your kind of stranger, might prove to be even better entertainment, and he is convinced of this when you offer him a cigar. Ever see any cockfights in Memphis? If you have a little time on your hands this evening, you might notice some activity not too far from where you’re standing, in fact in back of the store. Store is kept by E. V. Semple, a man prominent in several fields. You think you have heard of him, you can’t exactly say where. As your informant strikes his match, he momentarily holds one thumb against the other in a peculiar way, the bent knuckle of the right at the joint of the stiffly extended left, forming an angle that might be nothing—or a letter easy to read. He squints when your eyes meet his, as your thumbs do the same. It is when the two of you look elaborately away from each other, down the street, that the woman and her son again come to mind. The pair at the courthouse door seem to have been having one of the low, intense exchanges of persons who do not make scenes. Then the woman turns suddenly, her wide skirt belling with the force of it, and goes in. Whether the young man will follow seems to be in question. Then, as if he knew he would all the time, he goes in.
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