The Mortgaged Heart Page 20
"Just for a second—I have something important to show you upstairs."
John did not ask what it was and Hugh sought desperately to name something important enough to get John upstairs. He said finally: "I'm assembling a hi-fi machine. You have to know a lot about electronics—my father is helping me."
But even when he spoke he knew John did not for a second believe the lie. Who would buy a hi-fi when they didn't have television? He hated John, as you hate people you have to need so badly. He had to say something more and he straightened his shoulders.
"I just want you to know how much I value your friendship. During these past months I had somehow cut myself off from people."
"That's O.K., Brown. You oughtn't to be so sensitive because your mother was—where she was."
John had his hand on the door and Hugh was trembling. "I thought if you could come up for just a minute—"
John looked at him with anxious, puzzled eyes. Then he asked slowly: "Is there something you are scared of upstairs?"
Hugh wanted to tell him everything. But he could not tell what his mother had done that September afternoon. It was too terrible and—odd. It was like something a patient would do, and not like his mother at all. Although his eyes were wild with terror and his body trembled he said: "I'm not scared."
"Well, so long. I'm sorry I have to go—but to be obligated is to be obligated."
John closed the front door and he was alone in the empty house. Nothing could save him now. Even if a whole crowd of boys were listening to TV in the living room, laughing at funny gags and jokes, it would still not help him. He had to go upstairs and find her. He sought courage from the last thing John had said, and repeated the words aloud: "To be obligated is to be obligated." But the words did not give him any of John's thoughtlessness and courage; they were creepy and strange in the silence.
He turned slowly to go upstairs. His heart was not like a basketball but like a fast, jazz drum, beating faster and faster as he climbed the stairs. His feet dragged as though he waded through knee-deep water and he held on to the bannisters. The house looked odd, crazy. As he looked down at the ground-floor table with the vase of fresh spring flowers that too looked somehow peculiar. There was a mirror on the second floor and his own face startled him, so crazy did it seem to him. The initial of his high school sweater was backward and wrong in the reflection and his mouth was open like an asylum idiot. He shut his mouth and he looked better. Still the objects he saw—the table downstairs, the sofa upstairs—looked somehow cracked or jarred because of the dread in him, although they were the familiar things of everyday. He fastened his eyes on the closed door at the right of the stairs and the fast, jazz drum beat faster.
He opened the bathroom door and for a moment the dread that had haunted him all that afternoon made him see again the room as he had seen it "the other time." His mother lay on the floor and there was blood everywhere. His mother lay there dead and there was blood everywhere, on her slashed wrist, and a pool of blood had trickled to the bathtub and lay dammed there. Hugh touched the doorframe and steadied himself. Then the room settled and he realized this was not "the other time." The April sunlight brightened the clean white tiles. There was only bathroom brightness and the sunny window. He went to the bedroom and saw the empty bed with the rose-colored spread. The lady things were on the dresser. The room was as it always looked and nothing had happened ... nothing had happened and he flung himself on the quilted rose bed and cried from relief and a strained, bleak tiredness that had lasted so long. The sobs jerked his whole body and quieted his jazz, fast heart.
Hugh had not cried all those months. He had not cried at "the other time," when he found his mother alone in that empty house with blood everywhere. He had not cried but he made a Scout mistake. He had first lifted his mother's heavy, bloody body before he tried to bandage her. He had not cried when he called his father. He had not cried those few days when they were deciding what to do. He hadn't even cried when the doctor suggested Milledgeville, or when he and his father took her to the hospital in the car—although his father cried on the way home. He had not cried at the meals they made—steak every night for a whole month so that they felt steak was running out of their eyes, their ears; then they had switched to hot dogs, and ate them until hot dogs ran out of their ears, their eyes. They got in ruts of food and were messy about the kitchen, so that it was never nice except the Saturday the cleaning woman came. He did not cry those lonesome afternoons after he had the fight with Clem Roberts and felt the other boys were thinking queer things of his mother. He stayed at home in the messy kitchen, eating Fig Newtons or chocolate bars. Or he went to see a neighbor's television—Miss Richards, an old maid who saw old-maid shows. He had not cried when his father drank too much so that it took his appetite and Hugh had to eat alone. He had not even cried on those long, waiting Sundays when they went to Milledgeville and he twice saw a lady on a porch without any shoes on and talking to herself. A lady who was a patient and who struck at him with a horror he could not name. He did not cry when at first his mother would say: Don't punish me by making me stay here. Let me go home. He had not cried at the terrible words that haunted him—"change of life"—"crazy"—"Milledgeville"—he could not cry all during those long months strained with dullness and want and dread.
He still sobbed on the rose bedspread, which was soft and cool against his wet cheeks. He was sobbing so loud that he did not hear the front door open, did not even hear his mother call or the footsteps on the stairs. He still sobbed when his mother touched him and burrowed his face hard in the spread. He even stiffened his legs and kicked his feet.
"Why, Loveyboy," his mother said, calling him a long-ago child name. "What's happened?"
He sobbed even louder, although his mother tried to turn his face to her. He wanted her to worry. He did not turn around until she had finally left the bed, and then he looked at her. She had on a different dress—blue silk it looked like in the pale spring light.
"Darling, what's happened?"
The terror of the afternoon was over, but he could not tell it to his mother. He could not tell her what he had feared, or explain the horror of things that were never there at all—but had once been there.
"Why did you do it?"
"The first warm day I just suddenly decided to buy myself some new clothes."
But he was not talking about clothes; he was thinking about "the other time" and the grudge that had started when he saw the blood and horror and felt why did she do this to me. He thought of the grudge against the mother he loved the most in the world. All those last, sad months the anger had bounced against the love with guilt between.
"I bought two dresses and two petticoats. How do you like them?"
"I hate them!" Hugh said angrily. "Your slip is showing."
She turned around twice and the petticoat showed terribly. "It's supposed to show, goofy. It's the style."
"I still don't like it."
"I ate a sandwich at the tearoom with two cups of cocoa and then went to Mendel's. There were so many pretty things I couldn't seem to get away. I bought these two dresses and look, Hugh! The shoes!"
His mother went to the bed and switched on the light so he could see. The shoes were flat-heeled and blue—with diamond sparkles on the toes. He did not know how to criticize. "They look more like evening shoes than things you wear on the street."
"I have never owned any colored shoes before. I couldn't resist them."
His mother sort of danced over toward the window, making the petticoat twirl under the new dress. Hugh had stopped crying now, but he was still angry.
"I don't like it because it makes you look like you're trying to seem young, and I bet you are forty years old."
His mother stopped dancing and stood still at the window. Her face was suddenly quiet and sad. "I'll be forty-three years old in June."
He had hurt her and suddenly the anger vanished and there was only love. "Mamma, I shouldn't have said that."
Hugh could not stand the sad quietness and the mother he loved so much. He could not stand his love or his mother's prettiness. He wiped the tears on the sleeve of his sweater and got up from the bed. "I have never seen you so pretty, or a dress and slip so pretty." He crouched down before his mother and touched the bright shoes. "The shoes are really super."
"I thought the minute I laid eyes on them that you would like them." She pulled Hugh up and kissed him on the cheek. "Now I've got lipstick on you."
Hugh quoted a witty remark he had heard before as he scrubbed off the lipstick. "It only shows I'm popular."
"Hugh, why were you crying when I came in? Did something at school upset you?"
"It was only that when I came in and found you gone and no note or anything—"
"I forgot all about a note."
"And all afternoon I felt—John Laney came in but he had to go sell Glee Club tickets. All afternoon I felt—"
"What? What was the matter?"
But he could not tell the mother he loved about the terror and the cause. He said at last: "All afternoon I felt—odd."
Afterward when his father came home he called Hugh to come out into the back yard with him. His father had a worried look—as though he spied a valuable tool Hugh had left outside. But there was no tool and the basketball was put back in its place on the back porch.
"Son," his father said, "there's something I want to tell you."
"Yes, sir?"
"Your mother said that you had been crying this afternoon." His father did not wait for him to explain. "I just want us to have a close understanding with each other. Is there anything about school—or girls—or something that puzzles you? Why were you crying?"
Hugh looked back at the afternoon and already it was far away, distant as a peculiar view seen at the wrong end of a telescope.
"I don't know," he said. "I guess maybe I was somehow nervous."
His father put his arm around his shoulder. "Nobody can be nervous before they are sixteen years old. You have a long way to go."
"I know."
"I have never seen your mother look so well. She looks so gay and pretty, better than she's looked in years. Don't you realize that?"
"The slip—the petticoat is supposed to show. It's a new style."
"Soon it will be summer," his father said. "And we'll go on picnics—the three of us." The words brought an instant vision of glare on the yellow creek and the summer-leaved, adventurous woods. His father added: "I came out here to tell you something else."
"Yes, sir?"
"I just want you to know that I realize how fine you were all that bad time. How fine, how damn fine."
His father was using a swear word as if he were talking to a grown man. His father was not a person to hand out compliments—always he was strict with report cards and tools left around. His father never praised him or used grown words or anything. Hugh felt his face grow hot and he touched it with his cold hands.
"I just wanted to tell you that, Son." He shook Hugh by the shoulder. "You'll be taller than your old man in a year or so." Quickly his father went into the house, leaving Hugh to the sweet and unaccustomed aftermath of praise.
Hugh stood in the darkening yard after the sunset colors faded in the west and the wisteria was dark purple. The kitchen light was on and he saw his mother fixing dinner. He knew that something was finished; the terror was far from him now, also the anger that had bounced with love, the dread and guilt. Although he felt he would never cry again—or at least not until he was sixteen—in the brightness of his tears glistened the safe, lighted kitchen, now that he was no longer a haunted boy, now that he was glad somehow, and not afraid.
[Mademoiselle, November 1955]
WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND?
ALL AFTERNOON Ken Harris had been sitting before a blank page of the typewriter. It was winter and snowing. The snow muted traffic and the Village apartment was so quiet that the alarm clock bothered him. He worked in the bedroom as the room with his wife's things calmed him and made him feel less alone. His prelunch drink (or was it an eye opener?) had been dulled by the can of chili con carne he had eaten alone in the kitchen. At four o'clock he put the clock in the clothes hamper, then returned to the typewriter. The paper was still blank and the white page blanched his spirit. Yet there was a time (how long ago?) when a song at the corner, a voice from childhood, and the panorama of memory condensed the past so that the random and actual were transfigured into a novel, a story—there was a time when the empty page summoned and sorted memory and he felt that ghostly mastery of his art. A time, in short, when he was a writer and writing almost every day. Working hard, he carefully broke the backs of sentences, x'd out offending phrases and changed repeated words. Now he sat there, hunched and somehow fearful, a blond man in his late thirties, with circles under his oyster blue eyes and a full, pale mouth. It was the scalding wind of his Texas childhood he was thinking about as he gazed out of his window at the New York falling snow. Then suddenly a valve of memory opened and he said the words as he typed them:
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by.
The nursery verse seemed to him so sinister that as he sat thinking about it the sweat of tension dampened his palms. He jerked the page from the typewriter and, tearing it into many pieces, let it fall in the wastepaper basket. He was relieved that he was going to a party at six o'clock, glad to quit the silent apartment, the torn verse, and to walk in the cold but comforting street.
The subway had the dim light of underground and after the smell of snow the air was fetid. Ken noticed a man lying down on a bench, but he did not wonder about the stranger's history as he might have done another time. He watched the swaying front car of the oncoming express and shrank back from the cindery wind. He saw the doors open and close—it was his train—and stared forlornly as the subway ground noisily away. A sadness fretted him as he waited for the next one.
The Rodgers' apartment was in a penthouse far uptown and already the party had begun. There was the wash of mingled voices and the smell of gin and cocktail canapés. As he stood with Esther Rodgers in the entrance of the crowded rooms he said:
"Nowadays when I enter a crowded party I think of that last party of the Due de Guermantes."
"What?" asked Esther.
"You remember when Proust—the I, the narrator—looked at all the familiar faces and brooded about the alterations of time? Magnificent passage—I read it every year."
Esther looked disturbed. "There's so much noise. Is your wife coming?"
Ken's face quivered a little and he took a Martini the maid was passing. "She'll be along when she leaves her office."
"Marian works so hard—all those manuscripts to read."
"When I find myself at a party like this it's always almost exactly the same. Yet there is the awful difference. As though the key lowered, shifted. The awful difference of years that are passing, the trickery and terror of time, Proust..."
But his hostess had gone and he was left standing alone in the crowded party room. He looked at faces he had seen at parties these last thirteen years—yes, they had aged. Esther was now quite fat and her velvet dress was too tight—dissipated, he thought, and whisky-bloated. There was a change—thirteen years ago when he published The Night of Darkness Esther would have fairly eaten him up and never left him alone at the fringe of the room. He had been the fair-haired boy, those days. The fair-haired boy of the Bitch Goddess—was the Bitch Goddess success, money, youth? He saw two young Southern writers at the window—and in ten years their capital of youth would be claimed by the Bitch Goddess. It pleased Ken to think of this and he ate a ham doodad that was passed.
Then he saw someone across the room whom he admired. She was Mabel Goodley, the painter and set-designer. Her blond hair w
as short and shining and her glasses glittered in the light. Mabel had always loved The Night and had given a party for him when he got his Guggenheim. More important, she had felt his second book was better than the first one, in spite of the stupidity of the critics. He started toward Mabel but was stopped by John Howards, an editor he used to see sometimes at parties.
"Hi there," Howards said, "what are you writing these days, or is it a fair question?"
This was a remark Ken loathed. There were a number of answers—sometimes he said he was finishing a long novel, other times he said he was deliberately lying fallow. There was no good answer, no matter what he said. His scrotum tightened and he tried desperately to look unconcerned.
"I well remember the stir The Doorless Room made in the literary world of those days—a fine book."
Howards was tall and he wore a brown tweed suit. Ken looked up at him aghast, steeling himself against the sudden attack. But the brown eyes were strangely innocent and Ken could not recognize the guile. A woman with tight pearls around her throat said after a painful moment, "But dear, Mr. Harris didn't write The Doorless Room."
"Oh," Howards said helplessly.
Ken looked at the woman's pearls and wanted to choke her. "It couldn't matter less."
The editor persisted, trying to make amends. "But your name is Ken Harris. And you're married to the Marian Campbell who is fiction editor at—"
The woman said quickly: "Ken Harris wrote The Night of Darkness—a fine book."
Harris noticed that the woman's throat was lovely with the pearls and the black dress. His face lightened until she said: "It was about ten or fifteen years ago, wasn't it"
"I remember," the editor said. "A fine book. How could I have confused it? How long will it be before we can look forward to a second book?"