Just before she lets him, she does what she sometimes does—often on Sundays. She reaches up and tugs his hair, dangling so close on her forehead. “Irisher!” she says, eyes closed. Then nothing more.
This is what he could have told Jerry.
These were Pierre’s “passionate salad days”—a phase he had delightedly discovered himself to be in while reading, with his usual fondness for the passé, in old Edmund Gosse—and no man nearing forty, least of all his biographer, will pass up the chance to linger again briefly those arc-lit byways. We shall not, for instance, see Lovey, that girl so vivid even in arc-light, ever again after that day. For to date, neither has he. But we have seen what he was, or thought he was, in his twenty-first year. And as indicated, the day is not chosen at random.
They drove to Palisades Park that day, swam in the pool and did the funhouses; she had a bouncing fondness for these places, as if she thought of herself as soon to outgrow them—always roved the chance booths with a rube’s faith and could never resist anything eatable from a stall. In the car on the ferry trundling them eastward across the Hudson, she leaned, full of near-beer, on his shoulder, and dreamed aloud of the Bermuda trip with which any groom must make her his down payment, wondering whether she was a good sailor—was he? “I don’t know,” he remembers answering truly, abandoned to his first vision of the city from the river—at this hour a city seen through seven veils, unapproachable from the Jersey side or any other. There was no need to be guarded with her; like everyone up here she knew of him only as a Southerner, and was provincially all but deaf to any accent except her own. Indeed, like his namesake, he had come to have an accent, neutral of itself, that shifted with whomever he talked. But he had touched unwittingly—he had been aboard ship once but could not remember it—on that uncertain bridge leading to all from which he guarded himself. And the city, seen at the widest angle and just before sundown, before its own lights spring it back to merely an electric marvel, an incredibly soaring funhouse, looks long, blue and Himalayan—a cloudland from whose trajectories any man will slide. In that light, as he has often seen it since, it sometimes looks like its own ruin, an Angkor Vat of itself seen centuries on, monument to its own or any man’s self-assertion. He shivered, as once in the courtroom, feeling all the magnitude of his. Then the old ferry, more a piece of land creaked loose from its moorings, grazed its dock again, shivering with him like a sympathetic old lap, and he set the car in motion, rolling carefully between the ferrymen—chewing, noncommittal welcomers hawsering him safely onto the streets of an ordinary evening.
In front of his house she changed into the driver’s seat and left him, to meet the grandparents he must never meet, and the child—who was getting too bright and talkative to meet him often. He was rooming that year in a former frat house whose delinquent exchequer had finally been bought in by the university management. Two terms of this had not yet quite dulled its sybaritic arrangements—the cordovan lounge chairs, bequest of the outgoing brothers of 1927, the pine paneling, gift of a razor manufacturer’s son. At fine French windows opened to the sunset, musing in those chairs on a square of the river framed like a patron’s commission, one could well end the day making the grand tour of one’s expectations. But at this season the place was a scramble of trunks and all the catcalls of farewell, a boardinghouse being evacuated by a yearly plague. He turned away and instead walked westward up the hill along the city cross street that bisected the campus, was in fact privately owned by the college. To renew this privilege in New York, such a street must be closed to public use once a year for twenty-four hours; this was the night when the corporation, not quite disinterestedly, declared a Campus Night, barricading the termini with guards and a few garlands through which anyone with a bursar’s receipt might pass in order to dance on asphalt that, until midnight, was his own.
Tonight hundreds had done so. On the library steps the university band, its ranks already decimated, lumbered along by drumbeat, the brass melody snatched away by the city’s roar. Couples surrounded him, yards from each other but each barely moving on its dime’s worth in the decorous hunch chicly impassive above the knees. Someone had placed the ritual insult, whatever it was, on the head of the statue of Alma Mater. Her dignity, blind and verdigrised in the starlight, had survived it. A tug of war had just died aborning. A few urchins, squeaked in from somewhere, gazed up devotionally at its stragglers, hoping for a football star. But most of the hundreds here came from the vast enrollment of the accessory schools that now all but smothered the austere nucleus of the old liberal arts college—boys from the declining school of pharmacy, men and women from the thickening weed-growth of the “education” courses, theological students holding their beaver-faced dates at arm’s length—Pierre saw scarcely anyone he knew. It was a dull saturnalia, to the sound of bluchers working enthusiastically on stone. But like so much of what he had extracurricularly learned here, it was a social lesson on the hierarchies—so vigorously denied by the country and the college—that persisted here and would be met again outside. One could pretty well tell a man’s status, brought here or projected, by what he did or did not do during June Week. Only the most earnest would attend Baccalaureate Day—these were the future layers of wreaths, setters of cornerstones, along with the prudently early subscribers to the national habit of public joining. To these would be added, at the Senior Dance, men who were desperately engaging themselves to a girl or leaving one, plus a few late recruits from the fraternity house celebrants, more of whom would never get to the main dance. Most of the “intellectuals” (except for those who must blush for arriving family) would abstain from Graduation Day, none of them mount their sheepskins in walnut. At the very top were the men who had attended the university, city-vitiated though it was, because their fathers had, plus a scattering of girls either filling out their postdeb hours or representing the new social consciousness of the old rich. None of these, by now long since off to summer homes or Europe, had ever attended a college function at all. Life made its divisions early, no matter what the Constitution proposed.
Still, as he stood in front of his door again, he was not wholly immune to the mood of the season, feeling the loneliness of one who knew too much too soon, yearning, as precocity does, for some more comfortable division than that encased in itself. The sight of the river could always affect him, and did so now. Circling the city, indeed its primary vein of extra-human, by day it thrust the streets back upon their own mortality, miserable or effete. At night it ennobled them. Like any great configuration of landscape, it persuaded the spectator that the stretched dimension was in himself. From where he stood on the embankment the shuffling up on the hill, intermittent blurts of the band, traveled down to him like echoes of some midsummer whirligig, carrying the enviable mystery of the party to which one is not bidden. He let himself luxuriate in the self-pity that was always so fine as long as it was baseless, telling himself that he would have gone back up that hill if he could have taken his regular girl like the rest of them—even while he felt his limbs still suppled with the morning’s lovemaking, the skin of his face and shoulders pleasantly burned with afternoon. A little angry, a little sad, and quite happy, he let himself mourn the circumstance that kept him secret where others could be open, meanwhile preening at the drama of it, descended so early on him, still so young.
As he opened the house door with his special key—there were only twenty-five of them—that outdoors-indoors blend which always excited him followed him in like the heady admixture of life itself, and held him poised. In the swath cast by the hall light the sky looked at once wilder, more blue and shy, visitant piece of that natural world which was the invisible guest outside the most civilized habitation and would end by being the host. Even the weak bulb in the hall, faced with that spectral blue, had gathered to itself the wigwam glow that was the core of all habitation. Life had never been more instant, more real; he was here, floated in on that current of marvel ceaselessly offered to him, the instrument—neit
her existent without the other. The present suffused him like whisky, as it did in those moments when, reading in some philosopher who strove dubiously to prove the real, he flung the book down, stood up and stretched, conscious of teeth strong enough to chew every appetite, loins ready to swell, a mind, dancing in its own essences, that had no need to prove. He stretched like a cock now, ready to stay up all night if necessary, in order that the world might continue. Not at all sleepy, he would lull himself over some book forgotten by all but him and the faded listing in the catalogue. Generous pity flowed in him for all such, for old Gosse and all those whose salads were over, all philosophers, majestic or piddling, from whom reality, not waiting for definition, had decamped.
As he passed the hall table, he ran his fingers lightly over it; it held no threat for him; the monthly letter from his uncle, arriving always on the first, like a statement and almost as noncommittal, had come the week before, and he had not yet attained the eminence of bills.
His hand stopped. Rhines Brothers &Comp—He saw the old-fashioned letterhead tip at once, half concealed by mail for other tenants—the factory stationery on which his uncle always wrote. Your mother has partially regained the use of her hand, he had written over two years ago. She sews at the machine again, and at Rollins’ suggestion has taken on a few clients. One of the blacks—a woman who has been to the French convent in Memphis, does the finishing. Any small motion of the fingers still tires them. So for the moment I shall continue. It had been kind of him to explain it so, Pierre had thought at the time. But he forgets that I am a dressmaker’s son. Who does the cutting? She would entrust that to no one. There had followed, in that letter and subsequent ones, messages of love from her, and at intervals shirts whose workmanship was unmistakable. But the pretense had been kept up and she had never written. He knew why.
Still he did not move to take up the letter. Whatever it contained was untoward—no one could think otherwise knowing its author, that gradual man. Whatever it held would take him away from here. Something untoward. He would not let himself phrase it further. Pierre raised his head and listened. Except for the caretaker, far off in the basement where his own trunk was already in place with those of the others who would be returning, he was the sole occupant of the house; he and this pile of deserted mail. He knew what he listened for and what he heard—his biographer hears it yet. He was listening to that blind undertow of self which he had been taught to call selfishness, whose instinct is often surer, more cleansing in the end than the gentle, sacrificial waters that overlie. It told him to leave at once, take off for Serlin’s early, abscond as if he had never seen the letter, let it be lost or pursue him too late. Few of us are strong enough to obey that voice. Thetis, when she dips us in the Styx to make us invulnerable, always holds us cannily by the heel. One by one he picked up the envelopes that covered his own, envying the other addressees this flotsam—a few bright throwaways from haberdasheries, a letter, delayed for postage, from Warren Brown’s girl, whom he had married in chapel yesterday morning, several warning library notices to gay defaulters who were gone for good. There it was: Pierre Goodman. He stared at the name finally come to terms with by the sender. The envelope was written in his mother’s hand.
Six hours later, he left for Tuscana. There was no need for this kind of hurry, but after sending his telegram, he had spent the last four hours sitting on his bed, his packed bags between his ankles, and arrived at the One Hundred Twenty-fifth Street Station an hour and three quarters before train time. The station was deserted, as if only his being awake maintained it. Dawn came while he sat, misnomer here for a stir of air the color of bird droppings. Above the disordered sea bottom of these streets, houses appeared marine and wavering, as if already obscuring, liming with his absence, his banishment, in a beginning rain of invisible ash. Not yet aboard the train, he was already looking back with the paranoid glance of departure, in which cities crumple as we leave them, and the scenes of destination precede us into being one moment before we arrive. Already his was coming out to meet him along thread after thread, respun at a touch, that he had thought destroyed. Down there the house waited to puff into being at his presence, the smell of tea, arrack sweated from a thousand pots, in all its corners; from one of them his uncle coughed his exact and maddening interval; in another his mother waited with marionette patience, opening and closing her convex eye.
In the train speeding away from Grand Central, he told himself that he could still get off at the next station, but when it arrived there he did not move except to take out the letter, grasping it unreopened, as if it were an amulet to hold him down. As the car filled, he wondered how many others, in all trains, were consigning themselves by their own hand toward destinations which their very cells refused. Places were not upheld by sand and girders finally, but by the heart—that sometimes faltered—beyond that, to the last trump, by the memory that sometimes tricked but never faltered, that was the heart of life. To know this beforehand was the worst precocity of all.
Chapter III. Pierre Returns to Tuscana. The Grand Jury Prepares. Lucine. The Jebbs.
AT THE LAST DITCH few of us have time for salutations. “You got my letter?” said his uncle, meeting him at the train, and he nodded, not knowing what else to do, because of what his mother had said in hers. Later on I shall have to be in hospital, and would rather see you before. Rollins was wrong. The clinic in Denoyeville gives me about three months at the outside. George knows, but is not sure that I do, so we do not speak of it. Mind you do not. Better so for now. God bless, she had said at the end, but no salutation. And as his uncle clasped his hand and looked into his face, he had his first sense of how people, huddled cipher to cipher on the embankment under the great, overarching span of death, might have no immediate use for names.
“You’ll find her changed,” said his uncle, and Pierre nodded again, unable to speak, finding his uncle so changed. His uncle’s face, even-featured to the point of anonymity, never in his remembrance sweated or flushed with drama, still persisted, but now it looked as if some gross amateur stagecraft had been at it, puttying at the cheeks, scoring lampblack under the eyes, making of it an anomaly beneath whose exaggerations the median man of fifty had disappeared, leaving the beholder in the wings to choose for himself whether this was an old man or a young. When last seen at this same train, his uncle, in a soiled shirt and tieless, nevertheless had had the air of a man caught short by a disaster with which he still felt able to deal. Now, in a dark suit and collar pin, his dress had the same excessive, finicky neatness of those houses, swept clean of every mortal odor, that wait for bereavement.
The car too, the same one, shone in the dark as they crossed the siding to it; she was still able to take a drive in it afternoons. There were no other cars waiting. Tuscana was no longer the main line. Eastward over the ridge there was a faint palpitation in the heavens that real newcomers might mistake for heat lightning, never suspecting, if arrived from the west instead of the north, the tremendous kingdom of light that lay beyond the hump of this one remaining hill. Once out on the main street, it would surround them, crowd them to the center of its fixed swarm, but here, on the old siding, Tuscana had remained to itself as it had in him, a pocket of darkness that had resisted everything but eternity. The car started painfully, needing to be coaxed. While they sat in it as it warmed up, his uncle fallen momentarily silent, crouched in the tender alertness toward mechanism that was his bond with the new world, every sluggish throb of gas-tinctured air breathed him, Pierre, back into his boyhood—if he loosed memory by one inch from its halter he would see, to the left, a line of cars advancing single in the starlight … careful, he must remember that he had seen them going, not returning … he would hear a boy’s voice exclaim, “You come through the backs?” As he had now. He had come through the backs of the present, always accumulating behind one; the place of arrival, the place of departure were reversed. He was here. Then the old engine caught firmly, with a powerful rejuvenated purr in which one coul
d clearly hear the tappets, sounding louder, more capable than the quiet, city-serviced motor of the car he had driven only two days ago—ready to roll him once again along the streets of his valedictory walk. He waited, flinching. Instead, his uncle took his foot off the gas, letting the engine die to a pulse, remained for some seconds with his hands forgetful on the wheel, then turned and placed one hard palm on Pierre’s knee. The red signal blinked, reflected, a manic point of red in his still steady eye.
“I curse Rollins,” said his uncle. “I curse him eternally.” That was his confidence. Then he removed the hand.
There had been no stroke, he said, at least not one detached and causative in itself. She had a growth on the spine, now inoperable, that must momentarily have encroached on the neuromuscular systems back there three years ago, then receded, and was now dexterously busy impairing one vital function, releasing it to pursue another, on its ultimately single-minded path. These last weeks, in a miraculous recrudescence of strength, she had risen from her bed and taken over the household, but the clinic had warned him that this kind of change often occurred in such cases, where the heart and other organs were strong; he was not to hope. It was the last flare-up, in which the body, dominating its damaged parts, held its shape together for one bright image of itself before it fell; she was being consumed.
I curse Rollins. His uncle, rousing the car again, drove them off without repeating the words, but Pierre, hearing their echo, heard Johnny’s in their trek up the hill, blaming Semple, hanging the whole cathedral of the town’s evil, the angel-gargoyle framework of any town anywhere, or all good-and-evil, on him. This was the human mind, simple or profound, unable to face the matrix of causation, gagging at the sight of the crisscrossed inflections covering what should, must be the central absolute, hunting down some Judas to bear the monotheistic blame. It was she … he … they; curse him. And when all else failed, then came that last cry from the depths, from the dark workings before priests were heard of: mea culpa, curse me. Poor Johnny, poor uncle—poor Rollins, who must every day be confronted with blame to assign. Where his own mother might assign it—whom she would choose—he must hold himself in readiness to bear.
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