Had I a Hundred Mouths

by William Goyen

  In the evenings Princis Lester, in her straight-down country dress falling like a sack down her body, would stand on the front porch or walk up and down the sidewalk on Hines Street in the twilight and call to Zamour to come in. “Zamour! Zamour!” she would call, in a sweet song, until Zamour, plain country cat, would come dallying in on his delicate high hind legs and too-short front ones, so that he seemed to be coming down a ladder to his destination. Sometimes Mr. Framer, one of the neighbors and a policeman, when he was off duty sitting on his front porch cooling off with his bare feet cocked up on the banister, would mimic her and whistle back an insinuating whistle, until his wife, Mercel, came out of the house smoking her cigarette to tell him he ought to be ashamed. They were Rockport County people who drank their homebrew and fished on the jetties at Galveston on Sundays. They painted all the flowerpots red on their front porch and made a garden in their back yard with painted Roman-art bullfrogs standing on the rim of a fish pool, a goose, and a little elf sitting on a toadstool. Their garden was of city mode, azaleas and camellias; but there was always one row of onions and one of bell peppers and a little greens.

  Time passed and Princis withdrew more and more from the city and from the Neighborhood. She would not answer the knock of visiting ladies from the houses in the block, and one in particular, a Christian woman from the Neighborhood church who said she brought greetings from the Married Couples’ Class, and had a bob with a permanent wave in it. No one saw Princis Lester any more, walking in her sunbonnet to the grocery store in the late afternoons with Zamour following her and the two of them having their conversation. She and Zamour kept indoors. Neighbors watched her forlorn-looking house through their windows, ferns on the porch burnt up from lack of water, newspapers and circulars in yellow drifts on the porch. They wondered if she was sick or not. The men on the bowling team knew that Mr. Simpson had moved to the Railroadmen’s boarding house in town and told their wives.

  Then one afternoon there was suddenly the announcement of Zamour on the sidewalk, and sure enough at twilight the Neighborhood heard the call “Zamour! Zamour!”; and something was broken, like a long drought. They saw Princis walking up and down the sidewalk again. Her some sort of confinement was over, it was probably out of embarrassment or mourning at the flight of Mr. Simpson. Month after month, they followed this single daily appearance of Princis Lester at twilight, with only the calling of Zamour to let the Neighborhood know she was there, and her total silence and absence the rest of the time. “I think that’s why she calls the cat so long and so sadly,” one of the neighbor women said, “to let us know she is still there. For how else would we ever know, if it were not for the sign of the cat?” “And when she does come out, to call the cat,” another said, “she looks white as a ghost. But that’s because of the heavy powder she wears on her face, as if she’d fallen into the flour bin. Still, that’s the old Red River County way: all caked powder, an inch thick, and no rouge.”

  One day Mr. Simpson fell very ill and was taken to the Southern Pacific Hospital. He lay there month after month, still a young man and sinking ever so slowly toward his death because of drinking. Princis Lester talked once to the doctors who came and made her let them in by crying out that it was a death message—and she said at the door, “About who, my sisters?” The doctors told her that her husband must have been drinking all his life, for he had a cancer of the spleen from it. Did she know? they asked her. “No,” she said to them. “I never knew Mr. Simpson that well.”

  Princis would not go to see Mr. Simpson at the hospital. She wrote a postcard to Red River County—but not to her sisters—and asked her cousin, a twenty-year-old boy named Wylie Prescott, to come and try to get him some kind of job in the city and stay in her house until Mr. Simpson could die. He came—he was from the Prescott branch of the family, kin some way to her, her mother’s younger brother’s son, she remembered; and he had very little to say, or Princis heard little of what he said. She did not even ask him about Red River County. He took the back bedroom to have for his, though he never seemed to be in it.

  The young cousin began a secretive life, the city provided him this opportunity, and he got a job driving a large dusty truck which he parked on Hines Street in front of the house at night. He made his own secret life right away, or found it; and sometimes in the humid evenings, now, the Neighborhood would see Princis and Zamour sitting in the swing on the front porch and the cousin on the front steps playing his guitar. The Neighborhood, living their ways, would all be in their houses: the Catholics on the corner in theirs, the one who had the big tomboy named Sis, in theirs; those in the rotting two-story Graves house in theirs—all the roomers in their hot lighted rooms, their cars parked in front of the house and their radios on at different stations—while the decrepit owners, Mr. and Mrs. Graves, sat pushed back into one room they lived in, with pictures of their seven children and their wives and children on the walls. The yards had been watered and the mosquitos had come, suppers were over, the oleanders were fragrant, and there was the sound of accelerating night traffic on the close boulevards. Tree frogs were in the trees, for there usually had been no rain for three months, and their song was as if the dry leaves were sighing. Then Princis Lester would stroll up and down the sidewalk, ghostly in her thick face powder, arms folded as if it were chilly, her felt houseshoes on, with bonbons of fuzz on the toe, calling, “Zamour! Zamour!” and there was the faint strumming of her cousin’s guitar accompanying her little cat call.

  It was her cousin Wylie Prescott who came in late one night and saw something, after sitting in his truck in front of the house with Mercel Framer, with whom he had become good friends, playing poker and drinking beer with her to keep her company because Mr. Framer the policeman had night duty. What the cousin saw was Princis Lester sitting in her bedroom by the low light of a little lamp, gazing like a statue into a mirror she held in her hand. Zamour was sitting on her shoulder watching and poised as if to catch a bird in the mirror. They did not even hear him come in. He watched Princis and Zamour, then shut the door very quietly and went on peeping through the crack. There she and Zamour sat, frozen in a spell of gazing. He went on to bed, thinking, “As long as they don’t mess with my playparties I won’t bother theirs.”

  When Mr. Simpson finally died, Wylie Prescott disappeared, so far as the Neighborhood could make out, for the truck was gone and no sign of him. Princis Lester took Zamour in out of the Neighborhood for good and they kept together in the little house very quietly, to wait for Mr. Simpson’s pension. Every morning at five-thirty the faint click of the alarm clock, turned off now but still set at the hour when Mr. Simpson used to get up to go to the railroad yards, was like a little ghost living on in the clock. “Mr. Simpson is still living in that big ticking clock,” she told Zamour. “But when his pension comes, we’re going back to Red River County.” She played a game with Zamour, to wait for the pension. “When we go back to Red River County, what shall we take with us?” Princis named things first—she would take this, and she would take that; what would Zamour take? Zamour did not seem to want to take anything, only looked up at her through his cotton-eyes, arched his back for her to put her fingers in his fur, and rubbed against her legs, shimmering up his tail. They had grown so close.

  Most of the time Zamour had been so much like a person, a beautiful, loyal, and loving person, that Princis had forgotten that he was just a mortal cat, and she talked to him, did nice things for him, making plans for him in Red River County. “We’ll plant a little garden and have some okra in it, have our cow, and there’ll be a shade tree for us, when Mr. Simpson’s pension comes and we go back to Red River County”; and she would run her fingers through his fur until Zamour would stretch himself long and electric under her caress. But when she would come upon him sprawled on the bed, involved in his frank bestial sleep, mouth gaping and wild teeth bared in his cat snore, she realized, passing to another room, that Zamour was just a dumb beast and could play no game with her, speak no conver
sation. “Why go back to Red River County at all?” she asked herself despondently. “He is no one to be with.” Then was when she was so very lonely that she wished to see her sisters. She wrote a little letter to them and said, “Do not be surprised but I am coming back to the house in Red River County when Mr. Simpson’s pension comes.”

  Her sisters were still there in the old house. There had been a few postcards exchanged during Mr. Simpson’s illness and upon his death. What would they think when they saw her coming through the gate to the house, carrying Zamour and her suitcase? Or would she surprise them, come at night without their expecting her, walk up the road hearing their xylophone music which they had played together for years, hymns and sacred songs and some songs out of their girlhood, but most of all “Beautiful Ohio,” their best one. People passing the old house on the hill at night would hear the sounds of the xylophone and used to say, “Those are the sweet bearded Lester Sisters.” She would open the door, the music would stop, and Cheyney and Maroney would run to her in their delicate bracelets of beard that seemed to hang from the tips of their ears and loop round their chins, and take her back; and the three of them would live the rest of their lives together there in Red River County.

  But no… she could not. They were of another tribe, it seemed to her, almost as if they were of another color and language; they had their own ways, their own world—she was an alien there. There would always be the question in her mind, did they love her or did they mock her. It would only mean another waiting with the face mirror, to see if it would come to her, and with them waiting and watching, too—she was sure they would wait and watch, for how could they help it? I am not like them, I am not like them, she told herself; they make me feel so lonely and unusual… and she could not go back to them. She and Zamour would find a little cottage of their own near her sisters and they would live happily there on the pension. She would go to see her sisters once in a while, as the other kinfolks did, be nice with them, listen to their music, accepting their difference, as she had when she was young. The pension was what to wait for.

  It was so long, her waiting. Now she and Zamour mostly sat in the upholstered chair in the living room facing the front door, waiting for the deliverer of the pension. She made a nice place of waiting there. She and Zamour would not go out for anything, for fear of missing the person who would come. Every morning as soon as the click of the shut-off alarm sounded in Mr. Simpson’s clock, she would rise in a nervous haste and rush to her waiting place and begin to wait. Sometimes she fell asleep in the chair, waiting, forgetting everything but the waiting, and wake in the morning still in the chair; and go on waiting there. The chair took her shape, as if it were her body, and Zamour, who sat in his place on the back of the chair as if on her shoulder, had grown so nervous that in his waiting he had clawed it to its stuffing of straw and clotted cotton. But Princis had not heard or seen this. In the Neighborhood there was a wedding once, and Mercel Framer was shot at by her husband early one morning when he came home off night duty to find her in a parked truck with a stranger in front of his house, causing some scandal and commotion on Hines Street; and a baby of the Catholic family in the corner house had died—the funeral was held in the house and the cars were parked as far as the front of Princis’ house. But she went on waiting, bridelike, in her chair, and never had a single notion of birth or death or scandal beyond this sensual embrace of the chair and the longing for the knock on the door as if a bridegroom would be there to come in and take her so full of anxiety and saved rapture. If she had to get up from the chair for a moment, the chair seemed to carry on the waiting for her, though it clung to her and was loath to let her go, they were so locked together. But she would instruct Zamour to keep his place and take over until she got back—and she came back to the chair panting, as if in desire, to plug herself savagely into it and be fitted tightly, shuffling henlike in it until she settled in a satisfaction on this nest of waiting.

  If there was a knock on the door she would grow rigid and whisper to Zamour, “That’s Mr. Simpson’s pension, there they are”; and go to the door with a welcome ready—just to find a salesman of Real Silk Hosiery or Avon Products who, looking at her, stepped back as if frightened and went away. When the delivery boy had brought the groceries the last time—how long past?—and told her she could not charge them anymore because they did not believe at the store that the pension would ever come, he stood away from her and stared at her. “They all must think I am crazy,” she said to Zamour, and considered herself for a moment, then added, “because my face must show the secret waiting”; and went back to the chair.

  Still the pension would not come, and she waited and she waited. What it was or how much, she could not guess; but the pension was what all railroad people talked about and waited for, and when it came, one beautiful morning, everything would be all right. How it would come or who would bring it she was not sure, though she imagined some man from the Government looking like Mr. Simpson in the commissary, when he was so fresh and full, arriving on her porch calling her name and as she opened her front door handing to her, as tenderly as though it were some of Mr. Simpson’s clothes, a package with the pension in it.

  One afternoon of the long time a rain storm began, and a neighbor knocked on her door to try to tell her there would be a Gulf hurricane in the night. When Princis spied the neighbor through the curtains she did not break her connection with the chair but sat firmly clasped by it and would not answer nor listen, seeing that it was no one bringing the pension. But the neighbor knocked and knocked until Princis went to pull back the curtain and glare at the woman to say “Give me my pension!” and Princis saw the woman draw back in some kind of astonishment and run away into the Neighborhood. “The Neighborhood is trying to keep the pension from us,” Princis told Zamour.

  The rain fell harder, and in a time the rain began to fall here and there in the room. She did not care. But the rain began to fall upon her waiting place, upon her and upon Zamour and upon the good chair. “They are trying to flood us out, before the pension comes,” she said. She went to get the mosquito bar she had brought from Red River County and stretched it, between two chairs, over the upholstered chair, the way children make a play-tent; and over the mosquito bar she put a faded cherry-colored chenille bedspread she had made many years ago, just to make the tent-top safe. “This will preserve us from the Neighborhood,” she told Zamour.

  But where was Zamour? He had suddenly escaped the back of the chair in a wet panic. She managed to catch him, brought him back and wrapped him in her old orange velveteen coat with only his wet head showing; and huddled in the Chair under the tent, nursing Zamour, she went on waiting. The water was falling, everywhere now there was the dripping and streaming of water. She began to sing “Beautiful Ohio,” but in the middle of the song she spied her favorite ice-blue glass lamp that she had had all these years, and she crawled out of the tent, leaving Zamour in his swathing and rescued the lamp. It was so dark. Would the lamp yet burn? She plugged it in the socket near the tent, and yes, it still glimmered pale snowy light that made her warm and glad. She brought it into the little tent. She took up “Beautiful Ohio” again, right where she had left off. The tent began to leak wine-colored water and she remembered that old sweet red water in the gullies of home when the summer rains came. There is my home, she remembered.

  The wind rose and the rain poured down; and after dark, her blue lamp miraculously burning, a portion of the roof over the living room where she and Zamour sat, lifted and was gone. “What is the Neighborhood doing to destroy us?” she cried to Zamour. “They are tearing our house down and turning the Gulf of Mexico upon our heads.” And she remembered the leering face at her window of the woman who had come with some threat and warning to her. “Still,” she spoke firmly, “they cannot keep our pension from us. We will wait here.” Through her mind went the question, “What else is there of mine to save in under this tent from the destruction of the Neighborhood?” She thought of the cher
ished things she had possessed so long, to take back to Red River County in the game she had played with Zamour: the golden thimble—no, let it go; Maroney, her eldest sister, had mailed it to her parcel-post as a wedding present. The alarm clock with Mr. Simpson getting up in the morning in it: no. The little setting hen of milk glass who sat on her savings of dimes and nickels and pennies—she would get her, for she had been one of the things in this house to wait with her, waiting so brightly on her milk-glass nest full of savings. She found the glass setting hen and brought her back into the tent. The savings were dry, thanks to the way the little hen sat tight over the nest part.

  Now the water was deep on the floor and the tent was sagging and dripping. Still the lamp burned. One other thing she suddenly thought of and that was her face mirror that was willed to her by her grandmother, it was bronze and had green mold in the crevices, but on the back were the figures of two shy lovers under a tree. She had forgotten the mirror for so long during all this waiting for the pension. She waded through Red River and found it, feeling it out in the darkness, where it had always been, in the dresser drawer, and waded back to the tent with it, her hand sliding at once into the intimacy on the handle which she had worn by clasping it so long. It felt as familiar as a part of her body. “If the pension would come,” she begged.