Therefore, as I walked in and out of these, I observed how, on their slack filth, the ingenuous, lemon coolness of the early day deepened to a dirty yellow, hot and barred as the zoo-pelt of a lion. I noted without charity certain tribal concavities of face often to be found here, narrownesses between eyes, of jaws, a certain reddish-haired skin—never browning in the men and crumpling early in the women—of a fairness almost nasty, as if the very theory of the place had bred this phosphorescence. And as with any grand inquisitor, my step seeded the ground as I walked it, and what I looked for sprang up to be found.
There were three places I turned away from. I did not go down Pridden Street, and I did not follow to its dead end a path that now led nowhere, that once had led to the hill, now entombed, from whose myrtle Johnny and I had looked down. And when I came to the edge of niggertown, I stopped on its border line, remembering my walks there on those fermenting evenings of adolescence—when to be up late, to walk late anywhere is still an act of pride, savage and emancipatory—and how the night music of these people, their nearness, had rested me as well. What I felt about them, then or later, was never egalitarian; I was a neutral here as I was everywhere else. But no one can live near the ghetto without feeling its instruction, even if only as we feel the presence of those orders of nuns who pray for us against our wishes, interceding for us unceasingly with a heaven in which we do not believe. I looked down the lanes at their yard heaps, always reactive, always changing; through the flung doors I smelled the close odors bred of fealty, heard its steady, contralto drone. This was worthy, I told myself, but it was not Tuscana; this was that city of tribulation which is bedouin, which is anywhere, and I turned aside from it and went on.
The town was a small one; in two or three hours I had canvassed it, up one street and down another, and if I found any nook or face that flowered, I ignored them and went on. I had no intentions of justice toward it. No one but the years ahead could inform me that as a man adores or despises what he comes from, so is he invested with grace or malformed.
And when I came home, not stepping in through the window this time, but walking through the front door, I found my mother in that state of apprehension which levitates its harborer above the heads, voices, company of others, making him literally a wire-walker, an exalté. She had not found the note; blown by a breeze from the window, it had floated to the floor and lodged under the bed. Kneeling, I saw it, too far back for my arm but not for my eye, lodged in that dim plane of quiet like an old inhabitant. My head felt too heavy for my neck, and for a minute I could have wished to stay there, my eye growing rounder as it had as a child, watching what had escaped the broom to trouble or supply this lilliput country, a penny as big as a table, a dust curl that must be a dune to them, two steel girders of pins. When I got up off my knees I found that she had followed me and was standing there behind me, her hands tranced from her sides. Although it was not yet noon, she was already dressed in her best, with a towel pinned round her waist, and this—the towel and her distraught, faraway manner—put me in mind of the poor girl who had lived downstairs of us in World’s End, a girl either deserted or dreaming of it, who, until she had been taken away, rose each morning, donned the same party satin and spent the day so, a towel always around its gradual soil and her arms a little out from her sides, as if, if she only could keep uncracked the enamel of her preparation, everything would yet come true. My mother’s face, its fixity not for me but above me, had not moved one jot from its neatness, yet seemed blurred. Was I mistaken, was it the weight on my own neck, or had her head taken on an imperceptible tremor? Or was it the nimbus of the terrible heat that mazed us all? I noted, perhaps because I had been noting faces all morning, a blanched flatness above her mouth; who would ever have thought she had so much space there, stiff and white, between her upper lip and nose? Her hands moved toward me in two jerks and her lower teeth came out to worry a puffed place in the upper lip that I had never noticed before, just over the right eyetooth, a small hanging unevenness of the lip line.
“I thought you were gone,” she said again, not talking to me but about me, as if—having no friend of that sort here, no confidante whom she could call up as women do, to whom she could say without preamble, handing over her desolation, “he is gone”—she were handing it, the news, to me.
“For good?” I said. There was an echo there. Someone else had once said it.
She did not even nod. Her fixity answered me.
“Why would you think that?” I said, but that was for cover, for time, that was for so much talk, and she did not answer it either. Because when I went, it would be for good, and she knew it. Because she had forced me, made me to do something against my nature, and deep down she awaited from me before I left a reply that would make her answer for it, hurt her somewhere. In the same way a man walking in the dark, expecting a friend’s knife from behind, will wheel suddenly on no one, his fist already clapped to his chest at the spot where the point will appear. She shook her head, not in denial but as if she were trying to shake something from it, and put her finger tips to her temples.
“I seem to be shivering,” she said. “I’ve done so all morning. In this heat. How can that be?” Then she squared her shoulders, tucked in her chin, brought her hands to their customary clasp under her breast. “I’ll make us a pot of tea,” she said, her voice once again in its notch like the rest of her, and turned her back to me as if she had nothing to fear from me, as if to do this were the most natural thing in the world.
Thousands of times she had brought in the tea and I had not heard the small jangles and clinkings incidental to its making as I heard them now, with sharpened breath, with the pitch of acuity which comes to us in the midst of our own dramas, freezing every gesture—an outburst of a hand, a down-sealing eyelid—into bas-relief in the rear galleries of the brain. I had heard them in the same way on the evening she had told me she and my uncle were to marry. Now it was I who had something to tell her.
Obediently I had sat down to the teapot, as from time immemorial, at her bidding. Now I got up suddenly, left the table and went to the window, standing there, looking out. This habit at least I had not got from her. Yet as I stood there, words pressed against my teeth and I held them in forcibly with my lips, without knowing what they would be when they came, what they were.
“Don’t go today,” I said then, almost inaudibly. “Don’t go to court.”
“You have to go when the calendar says you do.” I heard the strength return to her voice at the thought of an authority beyond us, at her first swallow of tea.
I turned. “Let me go. Let me go there alone.”
She was drinking from the cup with both shivering hands clasped around it to warm themselves, as she had used to do on the fogbound winter afternoons of my childhood. She saw me watching their tremor.
“It’s nothing. Nothing but what I should have recognized the signs of before.” She rubbed one knee, her left. “Why … mind now … only last week at a fitting my leg trembled so it wouldn’t bear my weight, and I had to sit down.” My heart sank, suddenly recalling the obscure disease, never defined to me, that had bound my aunt. But her voice was not tragic, only musing and a little self-mocking. “I suppose it takes some women one way, some another.” She veiled her face with the teacup. “Nothing … but what … comes to women of my age.”
I had never thought of her age; she had always been there. Even to eyes other than mine she must have been then in that middle plateau where many persons, particularly the unpretentious, having weathered so far, seem interminably to stay. She was about fifty now, no, past that, although except for her hands she could have been taken for much less. My uncle was five years younger.
Through the steam from the cup her face appeared both sad and coy. And even to me, her son, her voice had held the tone, half fated, half smug, of women when they speak of their bodily mystery, that even in its decline bloods them to the universe, making a man only a step above the drone with its single,
discontinuous sting.
“Besides,” she said—and now I was included in her mockery—“how could you go alone? I am the petitioner.”
So she was, and now that the tea had warmed the whiteness away from her mouth, letting me hear too that voice sleeked with the midwife’s purr, half seminal, half Eumenidean, I could remember again how powerful a one she was.
She brooded across at me, smiling, and I had a sense of how in her, always until now so much the same for me, there must be multiples that she could bring out if she wished it, if she dared it, one after the other like a diseuse, like a conjurer, one by one.
“Great booby that you are,” she said. “All six feet of it, and its beard showing. Go and shave.” She leaned forward, the puffed place on her lip accenting the gleam of the tooth beneath, and lending her something of the mien (although I did not know enough to think it then, and know too well the significance of that askew lip now) that women have, softly battered, after love. “In the petition you are still ‘the infant,’” she said. “Remember?”
She looked at me through her lashes, and across the death-distance that annuls the filial I can return that look now, glimpsing what my father must have seen in her, my uncle found—the deep coquetry of a woman uncertain of her powers, who, in the rare hour that she is made certain, is more daring than a beauty, than a whore. “Eh?” she said. “Eh … George?”
Yes, she was the petitioner, the promiser who had already forgotten what earlier she had said to me—“We would not need to call you that name among us”—who, if I let her, would lead me from stone to stone over promises that sank behind us as we left them, not because this was her way, but because this was the way of the world, and to bewitch me along it was her role. If I let her I would learn how to accede, how to step so far into the center of the dim web that I would no longer see it around me. I would learn how to smear the possible over the impossible, how to forsake the pursuit of who I was for the practice of what I could. And if I came along gently and gave no trouble, one day I should find, with a sob of safety, that at the last the membrane of myself had broken, that I had forgotten the uncommunicable word I hunted, that at last I had lost what I needed to lose in order to be gathered into the enclosure where so many others already were.
I did not answer then, but plodded off to shave. There was no answer I could make, except one. She herself had forced it upon me. She was the petitioner, and she herself had made me see how much she asked.
Later we came out of the house together, the door scraping shut in its swollen frame with the comment that the usual makes beneath an occasion. “I am the same,” it says; other things are not. Inside the house the heat, domesticated, melted the wax in the furniture grooves and dried the shadows to paper shams, striping a brazen seam around the shades, but outside it struck once at the optic nerve and enclosed us, a column that walked as we walked, hung from a blur invisibly above us in the great stare. It was a day bearable only if one walked with it toward a sea. Gorgon images assailed eyes too lax for them; light flowed in a mane up from the pavement; down at the end of that waving plait each of the two men in front of Semple’s store had a face as dark as a negative, in a nimbus of iridescent hair. And all around us the dams held, a bracelet of steel lakes hoarding their cordial, in which, if we could have slit our way toward it, we could have lolled like tongues. My mother breathed with economy, her pupils strained forward as if they strove to sweat, a band of white circled her mouth again and there was not a bead of wet upon it. I came a pace or two behind her; she was ahead of me as she had always been, but this would not be for much longer, for I lagged behind to a new rhythm. Now that authority drew us in due process toward the courthouse, the name, the one I intended, beat up out of hiding, inserting its irregular notation in my ear—one, two-three, one, two-three—involving my heartbeat, the animal shrink and dilation of my skin against its box of clothes. The name throbbed without timbre, waiting to be filled with mine; I saw it as still halved and blind, as if still expurgated on the page: P—e G—n, heard it, not as a name that rippled or came firmly down but as one with a hesitation between its parts that suited me, an interrupted name. And so we came along, each on his own leading string, to the courthouse, and stopped there.
I stopped there.
“What … what?” muttered my mother. “Come along … it’s time.” Although she had halted with me, all of her still strove forward from the breastbone, like those caryatids which both move and stay. She leaned toward a picture ahead of her, and I was there in its center, not behind. “Eh?” she said, breathing short.
I was the one who looked back. There was nothing to see—a street, quiet as a dune, that had no power to hold me, the high dust curls of the dam, two lilliput men. “Don’t go in,” I said. “Come away.”
“What are you say—what can you be … ?” She put her fist on my forearm. I felt it grind on the muscle. “What …” she said and stopped. If she had any prescience, she saved herself from it; she refused it. Her fist dropped from my arm. Mine, unclenching, fell to my side. “You welsh then,” she said, and now her voice had all the breath she needed, a long, alto breath sliding in at the spine. “You go back on your word—you go back …”
The light mottled what she said, suspended it. Back. Where was it? Who went there? My lips framed nothing.
“Then I will go on with it. It can be done without you. I’ll go in alone.”
“Do not.”
“Yes.”
She wheeled, her skirt belling with the force of it. I had time to see again that it was her marriage dress, no symbol, present here in that subtler poetic of accident by which objects litter emotion to the end of life, their presence never escaped, never solved. Then she went in.
But I could tell that she waited; one corner of the dress remained motionless, just inside the door. I inched forward until I could see her face, immobile, drowsy with its own fate, in that moment surely resembling mine. A binding of love went between us that would never be again; the whelming sadness of those who are victims of one another. Then I followed her.
When the two men entered the courtroom through the side door and seated themselves, their entry, seen through the corner of my eye, settled on us like the arrival of latecomers just before curtain, the final, premonitory click of the mise en scène. As we ourselves were met at the door by the guard who tended it, a group of people just heard had filed past us—one of them a small, thin girl of about fifteen with the long corkscrew curls that some of the girls here kept with them through the movie-land dream period between pubescence and sex, who held a minute cuddle of blanket, no more than a palmful, slacked at her chest, its sealed face upturned. An older woman, fat, sullen and vindicated, walked between her and a boy of about the same age whose face alone of the three was tear-stained, under a cap of bird-colored hair that tufted over ears and collar—the putative father perhaps, looking younger than his babe. A wake trailed them—Coke, soil and a faint milk-sour overlay—detritus of moisty afternoons and gawky evening scuffles, already composting what would be from what had. Then the door-tender motioned us into central chairs in the first row and left us.
At first I assumed that we were alone. On the wall to the right, above the door that led to the law office, rolled-down maps, varnished and aged to vellum, showed county and township divisions in the thin, black scrolls of a past era of mapmaking; beyond them, in a vast framed work of one of the tinted litho-techniques of the turn of the century, blurred figures grouped round a conference table on some last military or judicial eve. In the corner joining the front wall, a silk ceremonial flag, corded and fringed, hung on its stanchion like a flag in a museum, in a stiff central point toward the ground. Back of us, at the long windows, twelve or fourteen feet high, that faced the square, the outer shutters had been swung to, and the long, muddy inner shades drawn, making a gloom that swarmed with after-images like those on the inside lid of the closed eye. The chairs waited behind us. Light came down from a pair of open squares
near the ceiling in the left-hand wall, in two hot, gold patches that blinded at first, one of them gilt and blue, the trembling moss of a Byzantine mosaic—then I saw that this was the massed yellow leafage, shifting a hairbreadth, of a tree that looked in upon us from outside. I fixed my mind on it, on a tree I could not place stirred by a nonexistent wind, on a cool limbo whose beings, flying smoothly through ozone, left a breeze on leaves. Facing us, the wall was wooden, paneled in dimness; between us and it the oak lectern reared up like its antler, its prong. On this, forward and above our heads, there was a round hole of darkness—a draped Bible perhaps, for the dark cloth hung down on either side. Then, as I studied it, the hole lifted, resolved itself into the youthful ebony of Mr. Fourchette’s seal-cap of hair. His face looked at us between arms spread out under a cape or gown, then bent to the desk and was again concealed, as if a bat, pasted unnoticed to the wall, had for a moment lifted its visor to reveal the white face of a man.
Beside me, my mother let out a small sigh of assent, of recognition, her bargain, her fifteen pounds’ worth, well in train now, well on its way. She settled back, head bent, as if she were in church. She seemed to find nothing unusual in his keeping us waiting so for minutes on end, himself unmoving, studying some incunabula we could not see. Once she stole a glance at me, a mother checking a child new to a ritual that is home to her, lowering her lids consciously again, as if she understood fully this silent sermon from above. She must have visited courts before, I thought, no doubt at home in England. It was then, at the thought of this, that I was truly frightened at what I had done. Professionalism, parched and venally weak though its face might be, had stared out at me from under that visor, and it was against this that I dared to pose my amateur hand. This was the one courtroom I had even been in, and I had trusted too much to the benevolent house-pride the town gossip took in its crankiness, its one-man audacity—to what I myself had seen, that one night, of its careless underside. Now I felt what I had not foreseen—that even it would subscribe to a conventicle that powerfully supported its oddest prelates; that even through that head bent upon us now in the personal ritual of the half-mad vain, this court partook of a wafer that went round the world. I caught again the room’s faint flavor, the odor not of justice but of practice. In front of us the lectern feared like a cenotaph around whose base one could breathe the odor of the bodies on which it had been raised. Here it pointed only to the ceiling of the courthouse in Banks County, Alabama, but behind its crude, country carving there was a huge alter ego that could divide and assign the crowd with the force of the finger that parted the Red Sea, or, with, a more delicate action, press one man into his grave. Possibly I was too small for its notice—at the moment. There was the gamble that my bit of self-assertion, first minute essay against it, was by chance at the edge of its orbit—that this time I would get by.
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