My lips were dry over my teeth. We bring ourselves, I thought, we bring ourselves.
“You’re just like Walter.” She is staring through my neck, I thought, to the hump on the other side. Her hand was at her mouth. She spoke from behind it. “You know nothing about us. Nothing at all.”
I’m still at Lasch’s. The trees are still there. Behind them, the black is paling before the gradual creation; a lost divinity patiently makes its statement again, today perhaps being the one on which we shall understand it; it will try. Though I try, though I try. My first encounter with the Mannixes held the germ of all the others, then, of the last. But that night, fleeing down their steps like a masked lover in whose silken face the lamp had been thrust, I was still too self-contained to see the germ in its entirety. I had all I could do to carry my bulging sack of terror home with me, drag it inside. She’d said everything, it seemed to me then; she had held the blinding lamp high, looked down. All the three months since, bent at my desk under my own incubus, this had seemed enough. When we spoke yesterday afternoon over the wire stretching from these trees to her sea, she said even less—what did she say?—only a phrase, a catch of breath, and a phrase—but then I began to see the whole of it. I could not have written of them as I have, otherwise. Take nothing for granted, on either side.
I heard what she said through the fly-cries of the people in the room behind her, steady as the climbing tone of the telephone itself, then caught, then righted, then gone. Why she watched me, how she knew me, said to my face in her mirror, You are honest; said to her twin, You are not who you are. “Yes, I’ll come,” she said. “Day after tomorrow. I—I can’t keep it to myself any longer. There’s something I must tell you, about us.”
Sitting here, I make a different guess as to what it is with every pulse beat. The Judge can walk more than he does. She does not marry. Who is punishing who? The Judge never wrote that article. They speak so little of the mother, whose picture is everywhere except in his study. Who hates there, who loves, who lies? One never sees children there. David did not marry the mute. They married Ruth to Austin, her brother. To what end are they all arranged? She is right. I know nothing about them at all.
It must wait for tomorrow, when I meant to give her this.
Can nothing, not even the memoir, ever be for itself alone, nothing, nothing, nothing? Her explanation does not belong here. And still she approaches, to her own threading of drums. Time is the bystander. Innocent, we approach one another. That murder we seek.
Chapter III. The Distance Between.
I AM IN A plane, flying back. Jet flight 119, six and a half hours to London, cruising at an altitude of twenty thousand feet, is carrying me back to my beginnings. Along with me are eighty or ninety others on all the range of human errands. We fly trajectories that once belonged to thought. The small voice of the intercom conscience falls silent. The steppes below us are cirrus. The motto glows: Unfasten seat belts. God bless our home.
Today is Wednesday, or when I left still was. Early Monday morning, before the morning wave of secretaries should find me at Lasch’s, I drove home dead beat, fell into bed and slept out the day. It was night when I awoke; peering out at the tiered lights, I dropped the curtains again and in an answering exhilaration lit lamps of my own. As I prowled about at my feeding and washing, I felt the hung-over, animal restlessness that comes from having disturbed the inner clock. A hangover has its clarity too. Conclusions swarmed toward me as they do to the drugged, and I watched them with a stiff intentness that might be joy. The memoir was gathered up on the desk, not that it was finished, nor that I had moved one millimeter away from what had been enunciated there—only that a shadow, as if from some stagecraft, had fallen upon it. Hers? I knew better than to think that its story could end in that warm, self-congratulatory haze of lovers who feel themselves star-pushed toward one another. We were not such a pair, or ever could be. One by one I watched the truth-bubbles float from the pipe. What sex is it, are we, but that solitary non-sex (once called the soul) which, from the moment it takes up the black dialogue of itself, starts hunting a place to lay it down? A man who has no place—hunts for a person. But we are not star-pushed; we choose our surrogates for the good, for the bad. Standing in the hall of mirrors, before the judges who may be ourselves, we give each other our weaknesses to hold.
In a start of hyper-identity I looked down at my hands. They were locked together. Nothing has changed, I said to myself. Once I chose Semple, on the side of the dark. Now I choose her, on the other. I broke them apart and let them fall to my side. No hand of another would ever feel to me as my right did to my left. Once I had prayed to forget, now I had remembered almost full circle, and I was still in the uncodified world. Youth, the perfect voyeur, had had the knowledge: listen; say nothing; watch the red game. I hid the memoir away, in the desk. And still the shadow bloomed forward upon it. Pretender, approach. Approach the pretender. This is the ordinary thing. Speak. The wildest prayer comes from the lips of those who know that nothing will change. I am not Ruth. I am other. I drew the memoir out again from its drawer.
On the mantel, over which Maarten’s picture hangs alone, are collected, well tucked back on the wide marble, certain mementos which, as they surfaced in memory these past three months, I had exhumed from their boxes with a hobbyist’s tenderness for these objects which persist, scuffed in drawers, kicked about on the foam-edges of a life, eventually to survive it. The three old books are still with me—Affection’s Gift, Demuth’s dictionary with its irritating, schoolboy Forsan et haec, and—visitant from the remotest reach of all—the dime-store address book with one leaf gone, which clung adhesive to my fingers every time I tried to throw it away. To these I had added a pair of Japanese slippers thirty years new, a large conch shell of impervious nacre, and my grandfather’s picture, that mutton-chopped pensioner whose rainbow array of medals had never faded into dignity, as if he still existed in some meretricious heaven even brighter than Bellini’s. Brought out one by one in the midnight hours by their touchingly faithful believer in psychometry, together they were formidable, as if he survived only to maintain the connection between them, in the way that some men are domesticated to their dogs. Beneath the painting which, with the imposed daring of art, gathered itself to a point that it professed to know, they had only the shabbier sincerity of old coevals muttering hopefully together in some park-bench corner, “A life. A life is worth something. A life.” My account of mine surely belonged on the mantel with them, having just so much meaning, no more. I raised my arm in order to put it there—and found my arm stayed. Somewhere in this manuscript, I thought, is my paring. Though I can’t see it, another might. Put it in the drawer, then; when she comes tomorrow, you needn’t give it to her. Put it on the mantel, then; though you cannot see, another might. “That moment when we know everything,” said my owl, “never comes.” Beneath all came the voice that—if there is any connective in all the disparate events of my life—is most mine. “Time to leave,” it said, “before you do.” Never as one dreams it, I thought. This is how actionless people thrust themselves toward action—first the wild image of what will never believably come to be, then the plodding, steadfast as a clerk’s, to make it come to be. Then, at last, my arm came down and left the folder on the mantel, like a catatonic who, peering for years toward Ararat, at last brings his mouth to the spoon.
The next morning, after my long absence, I went back to the office, in search of that reassurance of my own competence which we all ask of the daytime world. I received it. Removed so long from wherever people congregate under the assumption of acquaintance, I had almost forgotten what it is like with them when they do. On the streets, indeed, one joined with them in that conspiracy of silence whose faces, under the sunset compline, I had found so moving—anonym to anonym, holding himself out of the amnesiac flood of the world only by the power of his destination. But here, where he was gathered under that other priceless assumption, it was the reverse; here the quacking was
enormous, each doing his bit to hold together the skin over those private terrors on which we were all afloat, and it seemed to me that nothing in my recent weeks of solitude had taught me as this did, how exquisitely we must be alone. Soft as a polyp from its case, I felt that these animals like myself, for all their cruelties and self-deceptions, were exceedingly brave, so brave in their limbo that even the most stray remark from one of them should be examined with humility and tenderness. It was not a resolve I could keep, but for the span of a flash bulb I saw any room of us as we are—creatures of eternal quiet and the same humble thought within—The Messiah, who is myself, never comes—saying with blind gaze, over and over, “Hello. Hello. Hello.”
On the way home from the office, I walked with them. She was coming at six; it was five. The small apocalypses we arrange for ourselves, I thought—so small, in the face of those the unities arrange for us. She and I were doing the best we knew how, in the face of these. As yet I had no inkling of what hers were. As for me, incomplete though the memoir was, it had at least begun to show me the subtle way in which all my life I had despised my own consciousness, taking the gradual thickening of its complexities always for dishonor, leaning back always, as my century had taught me, on the wellsprings of the child. This was all I knew at the moment. Once I had prayed for the intercession of that feeling which wells from a heart that does not pause to know it has it. Now came to me, in a slackening so great it must be happiness, that the heart doomed to watch itself feel is not less worthy. I walked on slowly, waiting for the dusk that we love best perhaps for its ambiguity, when the real can walk toward us with the authority of the dream. It was almost the hour of assignation. I had mine.
Letting myself in with my latchkey, I went by habit to the rear stairs, and was halfway up the first flight when I heard the self-service elevator on its way down. It was she, I thought at once, for most of the other tenants were still out at this time of day, and running down, I was just in time to see someone emerge. From the depths of the hallway I could see in silhouette that it wasn’t she, but from the curve of the back, an old woman. As the door was opened by her, a lustral ray from its fanlight sloped down on a dim hat shaped like a scuttle, then the heavy door slammed behind her, Tuesday’s cleaning woman surely, my Mrs. Papp. I put down an impulse to run after her to find out if she was in truth the old woman I had followed on that day when I had first begun to feel the present, in the way that, a mile from the coast, one feels, fresh on the face, the limpid restlessness of the sea. There’d been too many such tangents in my life; that day had already served me well, showing me, in my vantage on it now, how I had come almost to a point that some men, even if barely using the most delicate movements of the mouth, might call happiness.
Halfway up the stairs again I suddenly began to run, in the panic that comes on us when we have too nearly named the good. What if Mrs. Papp, in some excess of senility, had thrown the manuscript left so loosely on the mantel? Or burned it. I had a grate. But from the doorway I could see the folder safe on the mantel, the other objects grouped as in a crèche around it, all serene. The shades were at severe half-mark, and from other signs, furniture twitched out of any reasonable composition, the sofa shining as purely as if never touched by buttock, it was clear that Mrs. Papp, that brown hen who worked only for gentlemen, had indeed been here. I fixed my mind on her as she cut her painful swath through the city, imposing on dirty bachelors the standards of Vienna drawing rooms fifty years gone, but I couldn’t keep it up; by nationality and a dozen other ways she led me back to Anna, to them, to what I would shortly be doing here. I began moving about the room in a dark, propitiating unease—as if providence tracked me, one panther step behind. But as usual, I recognized it for my familiar, my own objectivity, the same who had reassured me years on back, while I sat watching the flies in an old office, that I would never be George Higby. A man with a secret encounters just the woman who—? No. The uncontrollable coup de main came down. Events might strain toward us because of what we were, but once arrived, we always managed to change them, because of what we were. You’ll be unable to give her the manuscript, or she’ll recoil from what is in it. Something will happen. The planned apocalypse never occurs.
I’ve not come this far, I answered. Whatever happens, I will do something. Passing a mirror, my grimace recalled my old philosophy professor, not Serlin but the other, on the day he had demonstrated the freedom of the will. I shall move this ruler from point A in space to point B, Phillips had said, and with just such a grimace, as if he were slitting the throat of the absolute, had slowly brought the ruler down. I shall, I said, leaning on the mantel, looking down at the objects there. Her telegram, weighed down by the shell, was among them. The room grew dark while I held it. Sorry, guess I’m funking it. Better off on your own. Both of us. Let it be.
It was seven o’clock when I snapped on a light. She’d let me off, then. We were both let off, cast back on our own devices, to be what we were. I was what I had been all the time. The relics on the mantel still held my gaze, grouped there as in a crèche with the central infant figure not there. A man who has no person, hunts a place. My hand hovered over them. We are, at any given moment, all we are. I picked up the shell, and this time I held it to my ear.
We’re at Shannon now, put down here to wait for weather, in that confusion of bulletins—half savage, half parlor—which is now the way of the world. London airport is fogged. Storms have ruined the flower crop in the Scillies. On the coast, the worst floods since the fifteenth century. A shower of hailstones, big as eggs, in Tunbridge Wells. I sit here in Ireland, who shall never see Ireland the way I never saw Düsseldorf, remembering meanwhile a flight during the war when, somewhere between Seattle and Tokyo, we put down on a strip so small, among waves which moved like houses, that our landing run must surely capsize it—had tea at a fixed parlor-point in the howling wild of the Pacific, and moved on. Shall I never learn the Esperanto of my century? There are no places any more. Sitting here in Shannon, I say to myself, “There is a place,” as Johnny once said to himself, “There is a town.” Hurry back. I am hurrying. I am trying to imagine—steady-shuddering in the high seas, steady-plowing in the calm—how it feels to sail by freighter from Portsmouth to Montreal.
Day after day, there would be a landscape of white woodwork and water, the squeal of sea birds, the lack of them, and hour after hour, in the core of the ship, the great plunger that pushed us on, vibrating in the food, the voice, the breast, and after a while accepted, like the heaviest heart, down the length of a single, long white day that would never end—was this the voyage? I can’t remember. It was the long day that would never end even with land—the day after the last day at home.
That’s where I’m going. Journey’s end—no lovers’ meeting. Destination of passenger in seat 12A, flight 119—the last day at home. Is that so strange? On the shore I’ve left, certain sleepers talk by the hour on their mnemonic daytime couches; others prefer to hunt the chronicle only by night, in the paralyzed dream-rooms whose myrmidons, aerially fresh or diseased, can be counted upon never to change or to die. These days we sort our hallucinations as we may. With luck, my plane, riding so fast that it doesn’t move, rushes me toward the present by way of the past headlong.
The rememberers ring the world. But remembrance isn’t enough for me. It never was. Was this the simplicity toward which all my complex devices strove, and could never bring me? Hurry back?
If so, I’m luckier than most, for if it is in part a physical place one returns to, then the house in which I was born still stands, with certain people still remaining, others clustered near. And for weapon, I have my hump. Heavier now, there is where it began, with all those painful equilibrations I was afraid to call honesty. Also, as an encyclopedist, I have my resources. Yesterday, before leaving, I called the office and had read to me material from a biographic file I hadn’t looked into for some years now, though by my instruction kept up more fully than its importance might seem to warrant. Libb
y, the girl who had once decoded the ants under my sink, read it out to me. Yes, I am luckier than most. Sir Joseph, Fellow of the Royal Society, is of course well documented otherwise, and several of the children have their public notices of one sort or another. Hannah, under a different name, is the distinguished actress known to us here as well as there; Rosalind, after Newnham, Buchmanism, married a Labour peer twice her age. Martin, R.A.F., was killed in the early days of the war. Requiescat, Martin, restless dreamer at window sills, boy who pointed out to me, breathing close almost in friendship, how the Knight of Malta bled from the nose; rest, myrmidon, in the peace that cannot change. James is not mentioned, has done nothing then—poor James. Joseph, the next in line, is in Kenya—what may Joseph have not done! Names of several others born later. None named Pierre. No death notice for Rachel, Lady Goodman, but none also for the old lady, Frau Goodman, who must surely be dead by now. Sir Joseph is seventy-seven. Long, sallow, and so grizzled alongside his wife, he seemed old to my childish eyes thirty years ago; perhaps even then he had burdens that a child might feel—or a servant. Included in the file is a Daily Express interview with one Mary (Molly) Mulvey, holder of a ticket in the Irish Sweeps, household servant for forty years, who when asked if she would leave her post now, gave a gloriously nonrepublican answer. The Goodmans, like another household here, keep their servants—and their benevolences, dispensed like gold motes on the air, in the end come back to them.
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