False Entry Read online

  It was a perfect library. One entered by the only access—a low door under the stairs—a small, white, oval room about a story and a half high. Outside the house one saw that the flat railed roof of this room formed one of those mincing battlements known as a “widow’s walk,” but the inside was grave and austere, furnished only with a spindle chair and a long table whose dark leather top was ink-stained and chipped here and there to a spongy russet. The light, raying down from three clerestory openings in the wall, was poor, making the print more precious. In retrospect, I see that the room resembled a bookplate of a scholar’s study, lacking only the woodcut iconographer himself bent above the inkwell with the flowing plume, but I was too ill-learned then to carp because Manfred could not have strode that battlement, or to miss, among the books, the Greek strophes that should have been there. Once inside that room, it enclosed me like an egg perfectly blown free of all but air, the shining nacre of the shelves, and myself a stray blood-fleck of life left to nourish as I could.

  The nourishment, as I have said, was secondary, although this was not the fault of the trivialities to be found there. For, after half a lifetime spent with books, some of them of the purest diadem, events have made me see that books were always to remain secondary with me. I have never much respected them for the flat facts to be pecked from them, or even for those austral flights of the imagination whose unique province they claim to be. “Facts” are no more than a pox that changes its nature from man to man, from age to age, that saves in one generation and kills in another. And imagination, which speaks in dithyramb, can never equal the rough, fell syllable of memory. No, I already went to the books then, as I did later—and as I would now, had I not a better resource—again for the frame of secret feeling in which they enclosed me.

  A book too needs its confidant, as much as any man, but cannot choose its terms. In the long, suspended afternoons of childhood, that latitude which disappears with the coming of the time sense, to be counterfeited later only briefly by the first entente of love, I sat in that room for hours, turning over this or that yellowed minor page, saying to one, “This is all I want of you,” to another, “This is all you may have of me,” tasting, in my silent dictatorship, the terms that people would not give. And for this the minor books are best, the ones no one has read for years or will ever read again, for these are the dependent ones who seek most piteously to confide. Seated among them, I lost my servility for the duration of an afternoon. In the tricky light the room’s round shape was a shaft on which I rose, a stylite on his pillar. The colorless ceiling melted before my unfocused eyes and I floated there, apprentice to that folie de grandeur which is most of what really goes on between a book and a man.

  That afternoon I pulled down one book after another and restlessly set them aside, erecting a half-circle of discards around me, finally settling on an old miscellany called The Rose, or Affection’s Gift for 1845, to which, for its title, I had awarded a certain reciprocal fondness. When, later, I raised my head, it was growing too dark to read.

  They are in Memphis now, I thought, and bent my head again, but in that moment the tiny print had become invisible. Outside, as if on signal, the katydids began their chafing drill, the sound of the minutes scraping by. Pressing my sneakers against the chair rung, I listened, feeling smaller, for all my flight, than I had been before. On the table, strewn around me, the rejected books glimmered, pursing their blind mouths, taking that reprisal the inanimate always can on whatever living thing brushes it by. All the time I had been reading, the other part of me—the owl that sits on all our shoulders—had been waiting for Miss Pridden’s step.

  That (for convenience) owl, one knows of its existence from the beginning, long before one meets up with the Freudian phrasers. It is that thing in us which is neither super nor supra, not ego or tibi or illa, but sits in each of us like a pocket of outer space in which all that is qualifying, human, adjectival, dies. It is what presses the wrist of the whining diarist who thought he swore not to temper the wind to his shorn self, and points his pen a compass degree nearer the skin. Back there in the library, I heard its observing, vacuum voice, telling me, as I stood on tiptoe at one of the windows and peered down into the dark tatters of the street, that I waited for the release of Miss Pridden’s step, not for her company, but because then I too would have someone to leave behind.

  Across the avenue, in the house opposite, a circle of boarders sat at a round dining-room table; at that distance no clatter came from them, and their heads looked as if bowed in benediction under the gaudy lotus-bell of the hanging lamp. Between us, the façade of the house, with its attached smear of cobbles, interposed like a theater scrim; forward on the trough, a cat cleaned itself to some private, arching music, tucked its paws in, and gazed. I knew the house, having more than once delivered a dress to a woman there, and now for company I revisited it in the parts I could not see, climbing the Turkey carpet that ran, a faded hemorrhage, down the stairs, padding along the straw matting of the corridor, to the smell of CN disinfectant and the drip of basins, past each madder-brown door with its card below the transom—Reavis, Fitzwater, Smith, Mason, Dubois … the last of the names eluded me, and then, zinc-sharp out of its shadow, it came to me—Parkes. Miss Pridden, if not returned by now, must be spending the evening with the lady-friend in Charlotte who, I had heard her say with gentle commiseration, lived in such a boardinghouse too. Straining, I pried forward to visit them there, to project my ghost between them at a similar table, but I had never been to the place or heard her describe it, and I could not get past the blank after the main street in Charlotte. I am a revenant, after all; my facility does not stretch too far beyond.

  It was the hour before dinner, sweet when appointed. There in Tuscana the street was empty; here in the city it is never so. Yet it seems to me that I have carried that particular hour with me ever since. It is the hour of other people’s assignations. No matter at what o’clock it comes, its light is entr’acte, its pitch pipe the tearing softness of tires speeding forward. Useless for the grown man to tell himself that it is formed only out of the Schwärmerei of dusk, or from the jealous, genital wakening at midnight. I listen and wait, as I did then, and just out of hearing, I hear it—the steady pasturing of the world at its longings. It is nothing, I tell myself, except the late purchasers at the flower barrows—but the purchase is thrust by the buyer into waiting hands nearby. It is only a family leaning against its railing—but leaning ruddy against each other. And in some other street, not mine, the women merge, classic under the lamps. In those far buildings, so aerially close, the teeth of a thousand luckier diners strike against pearls.

  Across the way, the lights went out on the lower floor. I went downstairs and waited outside Miss Pridden’s front door, although I knew by now that she would not come. When I had been there for a time, someone came out on the porch opposite and stood there in the shadows. I took a marble from my pocket and flung it at the feet of whoever was there. It skipped into the darkness, a lost bead.

  After a while, whoever was there came down the steps and along the cobbles. I moved forward, to feel the wind of his passage. He passed me, an old man with his head down, and I felt it. When he had gone, I moved on home.

  Chapter VI. Ruth. The Place.

  SO, THEN, THAT EVENING I went looking for Johnny. At home the house had been the way a house is when it is significantly empty. Obedient djinn, it is there when you enter, but waits for you only to turn your back for its corners to dance and confabulate, for its antihuman cabala to begin. It was a mean box of a house, like all the others in the mill section—parlor, kitchen, and two inner compartments, over all of which my mother’s work baskets, the hung mementos of my grandfather, and all the other small muddle of our possessions spread only the thinnest stain of living, from which even my aunt’s collection of medicine bottles was missed when we heaved it away. Yet when I came in that night, it spoke up as powerfully as any mansion—“I am here, master, waiting: see how well and qu
iet I wait, to make you twice alone.”

  On the kitchen dresser there was a big spread, set out no doubt by Mrs. Boomer, the neighbor who was to do for me—a joint and a loaf under one of my mother’s best napkins, and a sweet I loved, that must have been sent out for—what the woman down the road who sold them called a “chess pie.” I ate heavily, first out of hunger, then, throwing aside the napkin, with a steady vengeance, sitting a while and then returning to the pie until I was sick of it, like a dog left among the dishes of several days’ feeding. Then, like a dog too, I left it and circled the rooms, picking and touching, leaning my forehead against the sour pine doorjambs, my shoulder against the tepid walls. Take a match to it and come away, I thought, knowing how, every season along here, two or three such houses snatched fire from their own dead heat and crumpled—not yet knowing how nothing ever burns in the past but what may still, at some later time, start up whole again, light-years away, all its corners complete.

  On the kitchen table there was an envelope with some money in it, the three dollars previously agreed upon for my week’s keep. My uncle, then, had no thought of wooing me with a new father’s largesse; a measured man, he allowed me no margin for hate. A tea tray nearby had some small change on it, and, precious to us as water from the Jordan, the black canister of Twining’s tea. This was my mother’s touch, setting out those small, winning comforts with which those who will not sink all for us show us the neat limits of their love. The overhead lamp glared on me in its center; in one of those dread starts of hyper-identity my right hand clasped my left, a stranger’s, and consciousness looked down on its body, saying, “This is I.” I picked up the envelope of money and ran out.

  Outside, I went into the privy and sat there for my needs, and a while longer. The sky, from a privy, is metaphysical; a wooden step away from the fields, one dreams oneself an animal again, crouching there in the ammoniac dark. I fingered myself, but it was not myself only that I wanted. Nor is it yet. I was passing through the strange borderland where one leaves the unconscious, tonal fugue of childhood and takes up the ceaseless, inner dialogue of oneself. I had a prescience that this black, supersonic thread of chatter would never leave me. And although I had not yet thought openly of women, I already wanted a place to lay it down.

  For me love is a place, not a person—why did I never see that before this moment that I write it here? The why is rhetorical. Nights ago, that night after I left Ruth Mannix, and, pressed beyond endurance, sat down to commune with—whom?—I who commune with no one—I did so because I knew how the act of the pen sometimes produces the submerged idea, like the hand trailing in the minnow stream. What I must hope for is that my hand, trailing in the stream of myself, will produce me. I cannot hope to be like my old preceptor, Frau Goodman, mulling over her heraldic place in life’s genealogical tree—that is for people who already have their place. And now I can no longer continue to live behind others, watching those who do. For safety alone now, I must see my own design clear. As for Ruth’s safety—even in the heroin-stare of that moment when, lying beside her, I heard her say what she had guessed about me, I did not need to think of her safety—I am no murderer. Violence—my own violence—is not my métier.

  No, I am in the position of a man who is his own inheritor—before I move on I must arrange my estate. And if I do not move on? If I stay for once, and marry Ruth, which is what she wants, or live with her, which is what she would accept? Then I must tell her what she would surely come to know, of which up to now not a soul has guessed as much as she. I would have to tell her the way it is with me, what it is I do, and that I no longer wholly know its meaning. Once I thought I knew; I thought I meant merely to be the manipulator behind the scene. But each time now is increasingly a rehearsal, a rehearsal for something, in a somewhere just beyond. Perhaps, in the end, with that extraordinary reed-sense of women to the timbre of whom they love, she could in the end tell me—and would that be the ultimate safety? In the end, might she come to be the place where the burden of listening is lifted, where the listener might learn to speak?

  Haply I think on thee. Thus is expressed for us forever that romantic folklore of the sexual love which we are all taught to anticipate, whether we are hinted it from the cinema or the sonnet. For in the physical loves of the most uncomplicated brute of a man there is a metaphysical hunting. He hunts for something lost, or only adumbrated, in the tangled scents of his beginnings. And from the first he is taught to name it in the language of persons, as the religieuse is taught to name her Lord.

  But if the lost quarry should be not a person, but a place? Then, even as he hangs successful on the body of his love, another part of him rises and walks away. Even as, lying loose in the after-quiet of love, I rose from Ruth. As, even while I listen, with men and women both, while I sit there storing and appraising in the familiar pattern, I walk away from them all.

  Then here it is, naked on the pen point, the first piece of me. All my excursions, then, into the lives of others, from that first time in the suddenly burst air of Tuscana when, leaving the courtroom, I passed Semple’s face, that beaten mask of puzzlement which dared not speak but said silently, “It wasn’t you. Then—why?”—all, then, are not an entering, but a walking away.

  Where? Some night like this one, writing along in this way, listening to that city of music which lies just below the diatonic three-o’clock silence, I shall drop the pen, hearing my own theme; I shall know.

  There are two chances. There is a chance that the two languages are one—that the place may be a person. Then I need only give these pages to Ruth; she need only take them. Is that what I sometimes fancy I see between others—a person-place where, circled in safety, one need not speak at all?

  Or there is the other chance—do I long for it?—that some night, raising my head to hear, I shall recognize—not whom—but where.

  It is getting light. Hours must have gone by since I wrote that.

  I do not walk away. I see that clear. I do not walk away.

  I walk toward.

  Bit by bit I shall drag myself up, out of the stream. Haply I think on—there.

  I walk toward.

  Chapter VII. The Fair. The Cars of Tuscana.

  FACING ME, THROUGH THE warped door of the privy, a stretch of mongrel fields led behind the town, along past the Negro quarter, to the railroad line. In the half-luminous Indian summer night the weeds looked of an even height, as if they were some bearing crop. Beyond their motionless rim, over near Johnny’s place, the red signal-eye burned and waned, blinking for the 8:38 freight, still a mile away.

  I went outside and waited. It was a quiet night for market day; near us there were no houses close enough for me to see, but over in the black-brown jumble of niggertown, in “the backs” where they paraded in the evenings, all seemed nested down. I could hear the train coming now, but the hour must be later than I thought; this was not the slow freight, creaking along like an endless cradle, to the jerk and settle of its couplings, but an undertow that shook my belly with the ground. This was the 9:50 coming up from the South, all the way from the Gulf maybe, north to the next big city whose name I did not even know; this was the passenger-flyer, going north.

  A huge white core grew toward me, splaying the dark. It rushed past, whistle mute. Under its hard breath, the weedy sidings stood up like wheat. Then it vanished, with a sound of squeezed air, and I heard it for a while far off, running on to all the other small towns ahead that burned and waned. This was the “to-from Memphis” train.

  I put my head on my knees and wept. I wept for my mother, who, having let me see that I was not enough for her, had made me see that she was no longer enough for me. This is the real parting; when she died I did not need to weep.

  I wept for things as they were. The stars, hanging low, crept golden into my tears, and I wept on because I might never know how things ought to be. And when I was done, I went looking for Johnny, because he knew both.

  The signal light lay straight across fi
eld, but I took the long way round, delaying. As I walked, I kept touching the envelope of money in my pocket, seeing the two of us, Johnny and me, sitting almost like men together, while I treated him down at the café. As I went on, the image failed me—but I went on. This is how actionless people thrust themselves into 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.

  Ahead, in the backs, it was dark as a cave, but I had often walked there of an evening, for the sake of the distant demi-company of the blacks. Their company—veiled glances and a soft return to their own concerns—was a kind of music to me, a negligent night music to which I need only half listen, and the short, blocked lane of their lives, blurred with oil lamps and people leaning, was a place where I need not watch. It was a painting I walked through, velvet unison of skin and dark and the candle-spurt of voices. This is the power of the ghetto for others; it releases from the friction of kin. The eye of the ghetto absolved me from being the eye; it was not possible to enter here.