After he had gone, his sentences burned curatively behind him, and through the crack of the doorjamb at which I had been listening, the sickroom glowed in the spiritual blue shed by the one lamp, around which Mrs. Jebb, before leaving, had pinned a twist of the paper from a roll of surgical cotton. It was an aniline light I recalled from the sickrooms of childhood, falsely peaceful and removed, on the edge of nightmare. In its coal-gleam shadow my mother, raised on pillows, her braided hair on her shoulders, appeared freakishly young, a dwarf-woman with the lined face of a pseudo child. The sedative given her had not yet taken effect. Eyes brooding past the horizon of the room, hands upcurled on the coverlet, she lay immured on the raft of her bed like those women whom one glimpsed from the hospital corridor at visiting hour, women cleansed for exhibit, from whom the drama of illness had been taken—Mrs. Jebb had even bound ribbon in her braids.
“What are you mooning there for, lad, she’s going to be fine. No need to pussyfoot behind doors!” My uncle, returning from “just a few words” outside with the departing doctor, had brought back some of the latter’s manner with him—he had never in his life called me “lad.” Genially he dragged me forward to the bedside; she raised her drowsing eyes; I looked down. The glance we had exchanged on the courthouse steps was equal—this was also. It was a glance from which each of us tried to break away, to which each returned. My arms, heavy as if they still had her weight on them, hung at my sides. And she looked away and back again, as the mother does who, never having held her child free of foreboding, now has that nameless worry confirmed. Who can tell how all this begins between those equilibrists fated to each other, parents and children? I never see them together at a playground but I think of it, watching the child, always at least one, of whom ill is already subtly expected, who can but grow up to fulfil what is asked of him, by and by. She tried to speak now, straining until the neck cords showed, her lips stiff and parted, but only a gurgle escaped them.
“Don’t! Don’t do that, Dora, don’t try. You heard what he said just now. It will come back to you.” My uncle stood by the side of the bed. “It’s something you want, isn’t it?” She nodded, rolled her head from side to side. “I tell you what—close your eyes.” She had already closed them, but her face lacked the sweet, open nudity of faces in repose; the twisted mouth guarded it, satirizing my uncle, his game. I tried to slip out of the room, but he held me fast with his hard hand on my wrist, and again this broke the usual form between us, for always he had been careful to be the uncle, the stepfather; he had never laid a hand on me, never touched me before. “No,” he said, “you might guess it quicker than I.”
He began his litany—was it food, warmth or drink she wanted, was it the bedpan? One by one he enumerated the bread-and-meat facts of a household, of an illness, of existence, and as he uttered them with bowed head a poetry issued about them, from this man whom I had once compared to a myna bird talking. One by one he dealt with them—animal, vegetable, mineral—in a voice whose justness I had never seen to be tenderness, under whose careful phlegm I had never suspected the ultimate poise. I remembered now how one might see him at the mill, his head inclined as if he were listening to certain multiples, his hand going out to, never touching, the looms. Was it the wireless? He could put it on the nighttable. Was it the household? He could provision it and as she well knew there was enough money. If it was the clients, he would phone them. Was it the stained dress? He would put it to soak. He had already thought of how she might manage tea—there was one of those bent glass tubes she might drink from. One recalled then how many years he had lived with another invalid, but he had never been like this with my aunt. There seemed no corner of my mother’s needs, of her longings that he did not anticipate, con over again in that dry voice so willing to run for them—the drink, the blanket, the pillow—that uttered them like endearments, as if he said darling darling darling out loud in the increasing shadows of the room. Animal, vegetable, mineral. But above that mocking lip-seam, her eyes remained closed. The voice faltered, failed. “Not—not the pan?”
All that time through that listing, that lesson, his hard fingers, unconsciously clasping, had nursed mine. And I had no response I could make, except to guide them to the one circle of her needs he stood outside of, had forgotten.
“Ask her,” I said, “if it is something about me.” And before he could ask her, the lids flew open, her eyes stared.
He dropped my arm. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Will you ask her then?”
“Let me go,” I said low. “Let me go.”
On the pillow the gurgling began again, the head tolling from side to side.
“Don’t! Don’t!” cried my uncle, almost shouting. “Let me see, let me see,” he said, muting his voice. “Perhaps a pencil, no, you couldn’t manage it, could you.” He nursed her hand as he had mine, bent his lips to it absently. “Wait,” he said, “I have it.” He sat on the side of the bed. “Hold on.” He took a pencil and a bit of paper from his breast pocket, reached for a book that always lay on the night table—the pocket Bible given my mother by her father when she went to France. Resting the paper on this, he took my mother’s left hand, placed it against his. “You know how the deaf-and-dumb talk to each other,” he said. “With their fingers. You do it that way, eh? Trace the letters one at a time, in my hand. And I’ll write each down. And show it you as I do.”
That was the way her rage fell upon me, not as I had envisioned it—(never as one envisions it)—transcribed silently from her hand to his to the paper, while I cringed, stiffened, remained. Regret is not wild. It is a silence hung between two masks, in which we lay our foreheads first against one, against the other, knowing that if given the magic return to the moment before choice, we must choose as before.
My uncle finished, read what he had transcribed. The paper crumpled slowly in his hand. “Then … what that nasty …” He got up from the bedside and led me from the room, closing the door behind him. We stood in the hallway, hearing each other’s breath in a savage mingling that all the years of to-and-fro in that narrow passage, narrow house had not achieved. Over his shoulder, the sitting room, not three feet away from us, the bottle on its table, the clenched chairs, appeared like the distant edge of the civilized world.
“What have you done?” he said. “Back there in court. What can you have done to her?” He reached upward, in back of him, but only to turn on the hall bulb. Its glare made us blink, a light in limbo, that no one had ever bothered to shade. Did I hope, in the moment while his arm went up, that he meant to strike me? I know that I moved closer, not away.
On the floor between us lay the dropped paper. I touched it with my shoe.
“Never mind that. Answer me!”
“I took another name. But—not yours.”
“You took—”
I nodded.
“And without her?”
Yes.
“How did you manage it?”
I told him.
He swore, so far under his breath that I could not hear the words, although I thought I caught one—“town.” After that he was silent for a moment. Neither of us moved. “She should have known,” he said then. “She should have known.”
“What?”
He raised his head. “You.”
Does he not see then, I thought? Even now? That if what happened to her befell her because of me—it is because she knows me? He is blind, I thought, staring into his eyes, and there is no need to tell him.
“I should have told her,” he said. “That it could never be.”
Timidly, for the first time, I touched his arm, perhaps because one did not needlessly hurt the blind. And perhaps not. “I did not do it—against you.”
He did not shrink from me. But I found that when one tells the truth out of pity, that is often the way one gets it back.
“You poor … poor …” he said. And because he said it without patronage, in a quiet marvel over all of us, I could feel that I was. I know now that he was a man fro
m whom, if ever he had touched me, I would have learned; if ever he had spoken, I would have heard. And I know now why he moved so carefully, spoke so seldom. He was a man so undeceived about others that he could say little that would not hurt or repel them, who in his own life dared move only from modulation to modulation because he had so little self-deception on which to depend. But that clear inner eye from which he suffered was not, as Fourchette’s was, disengaged. For all his outer evenness he was still immersed in the current, still mortally capable of pain, and of more.
“What did you think, then?” he said roughly. “Did you think I thought I could get a son by letting her scribble my name down for him? I did it for her!” Then he struck his fist against his forehead, a single blow, not distracted, almost grave, that might have been anything, a reproof for forgetting her now or the sharp “to heel” of a man returning himself to himself; and pushing me aside, he went into the bedroom again and shut the door.
I picked up the paper from the floor and held it, still crumpled, in my hand. What more could it teach me that I had not already learned? I had not even thought to impute that—that he did it for her.
Just then the door, ill-hung, ill-fitted like every part of that house, swung silently wide as was its habit to swing, back and forth in the draft from the passage, unless it had been latched. Raised on her pillows, my mother faced me. She was still awake; her eyes gleamed in the light cast from behind me; to her I must have appeared as the men on the street had that afternoon with the sun behind them—a dark face with a bright nimbus of hair. My uncle was oblivious; he was kneeling at the side of the bed with his back to me, one arm flung across her knees.
“He did it against me,” he was saying. “Not you. He did it against me.”
Lying there under the blue lamp, she said nothing, made no move. He would not know why she could never believe him—he was childless. But she would know that I did what the child must do—hunt for the quick of the parent, and pierce there.
“Please believe it,” he said. “He did it against me.”
He does this for her too, I thought. How chary I have been to admit it—the real motive. But this, that he tells her now, she surely cannot believe.
Then, as I watched them, as the door inched slowly toward me in its reverse arc, her arm came up around him. I saw her head nod, not in sleep, her eyes close and reopen, and still nodding, she held him, kneading his bowed shoulders with her good left hand. The door came between us like a curtain, leaving me outside it, outside them. Once more I had forgotten to impute the motive of love.
Three days later, on the evening of the third day, I left Tuscana. I had no need to spend the intervening hours in arrangements. My effects were few and I had always planned to take less; I was going where abundance was. In a great city, personality itself is to be had for the making; this is the deep, real reason that carries a clever provincial there. And in my summertime dreams of my arrival there—fantasies bred while I worked at the market, never seeing the hawker’s colors of that evening bourse already undergoing its own fatal change—I saw myself arriving in a dawn whose steel-flushed outlines and avenues I had already studied, saw myself facing that chemically rising light with nothing but the brain that had got me there. I could have wished to have awakened like a foundling on one of its paving stones, naked even of swaddling clothes, or to have rubbed my eyes open to those complex rays like some gay stripling who has slept all night in a doorway, and now finds himself hungry, powerful and healthily amnesiac, remembering only his name. Now, instead, I found myself in a strange preamble of nakedness, under edict in Tuscana, here.
The words on the piece of paper had been these: I want him away. Tell him I do not hold it against him. But I want him away. Nothing further was said, nor was the paper itself mentioned by my uncle again. The paper had vanished; he seemed to assume that I had seen it, that I would do the right thing—and that I would know what the right thing was. Only in retrospect does the simplicity of that last seem extravagant. For I did know.
I knew that my mother wanted me to leave at once, and without seeing her, without her having to see me again. One learns from the hurt one inflicts as well as from the hurt one suffers—this is a lesson elided in the popular self-help primers of love. And at my mother’s bedside I had learned that it is not the victim in us that needs to turn away.
My uncle, when I told him I was leaving, said little. At first he merely registered a cough—that dry, aphysical trade-mark of a man who collected neither crotchets nor colds—a cough without ponder, a mere punctuation. I think now of how long I lived with it, despising it as the tic of an inner aridity—that sound which instead marked time for him while he chose from his heavy store of honesty the least gnomic reply, the answer that would least trouble others with the weight of themselves.
“Best,” he said then, “best for all of us.” And then, before he had time to warn himself, cough again quickly: “I knew you would know to do that.”
This was the first he had addressed me since our exchange in the hall. “She should have known,” he had said then, and now—“I knew.” His blunt expectation, even at this late date, of the best from me, was something new and astringent, masculine, making me suspect what I might have lost by having been reared by women. How strangely he was making me feel, with his assumptions—was it he or I who had changed? Confused, I waited for more. I did not ask him, as I ask myself now, how he knew.
But he required, gave, nothing further. Thereafter, while he absented himself from the mill until a nurse should be found, and spent all his hours with my mother, I was left to my vacuum. Except for the fact of going, I was already gone, disposed of as the consciousness must of necessity do with those, good or bad, who are about to be removed from our sufficiently complicated scene. There was no malice here; it was character—of the twenty-twenty-visioned eye that, strive as it may not to make a show of anticipating the purblind, cannot always keep from anticipating itself. It was the perfect ostracism, one that did not even turn aside. And the perfect punishment—for which others are never more than agents—the nudge, not of dogma, but of life. I had wished for freedom from all ties; now I was left to find out what that freedom was.
Friday had been the day in court, Saturday the day I had told him my decision too late for the schedule; Sunday there were only local trains. I would leave on Monday evening—a short interim, but more than enough time to explore the vacuum that has no clock. I often think of that solitary bout—it was my first. It was my first step into the sinkhole of identity. Every man, even the most coherent, the strongest, has moments when his foot sinks suddenly in that abyss—a voice asking, “Who am I?” To which echo answers, “Am I?” Loneliness is a mere wavelet on that surface, a kitchenmaid’s word for a crater whose term of definition, if there is one, must lie among the philosophical—perhaps some black neologism that compounds them all. For these are moments that come by seeming vagary, uncoupled with ordinary loss. Ordinary misery—loss of a woman, of a child, of a friend in war, of any appendage of the heart or the body—is no vacuum. The sundered body is a bowl that fills with dark. But in the vacuum one comes, pas seul, to that farther edge of ego where, if one does not whirl away quickly in some pas de deux of activity, one might feel what only the dying should feel—the loss of loss.
As everyone must, I was to find my own ways of dealing with this; under the aspect of eternity all methods are no doubt equally absurd. But at that time I had none. Three feet away from me was the edge of the civilized world, but as far from my grasp as the far shore in a binocular lens. Meanwhile, flowers came for my mother from Miss Pridden; some of them had time to fade. In my room I had already had for some days now Demuth’s parting gift, parting shot, never to be acknowledged, a German grammar on whose flyleaf “Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit” had been elaborately inscribed. “Perhaps someday you will be glad to remember this.” What I remembered instead when I saw it was that other tag, truism from the Schwäbisch of his fathers, that
other untranslatable, all-translatable sheep’s bawl. But that too came from a distant shore. I had meant to rise hand over hand on the single rope of myself; now, without the asseveration of others, the rope disappeared. And meanwhile my uncle passed and repassed me in the hall.
On Monday evening he drove me to the train with my parcel of books, my one bag. I had expected to walk; his offer came to me as a surprise, a rescue. It was again one of the long dusks, the air cotton-warm and clogged, but I felt the wonderful, cool renewal of doing, as if I had been ticking away under a bell glass that now was removed. The traveler is crisp with organization, his very flesh hardens forward; to his futurist eye those who are staying on behind seem soft and idle in their lack of schedule, safely placed folk but fainthearted, already receding. Seated beside me in the car, my uncle as he drove looked so to me.
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