False Entry Page 9

  I opened them quickly, hearing the fright in her voice.

  “You need friends of your own,” she said huskily. “Not that silly man, nor some old woman, nor—us.” She pressed her lips together. I saw her cry once. It was not then. Her hands fell to her sides. “Is there not—some boy here you would like to bring home?” She smiled at me, her lips trembling. “For—supper?”

  “Nobody,” I said quickly. “Nobody here.”

  “Here?” Her lips remained parted.

  I thought of Johnny—the thought of him a dark fin too, but one no longer to be hunted. I looked at our lamp—dim here, shining orange to someone outside. “Nobody,” I said, in requiem.

  She crossed to the table and began quietly to set out the plates, putting them down without clatter but pressing each one hard into the cloth with the heel of her hand. “You’ve some plan of your own, then?”

  Just then my uncle entered. He had a cough that was like a part of speech and served him almost in place of it, moving him effectively from hour to hour, from question to answer, from parting to greeting, and now he hung up his cap and coughed.

  “No,” I whispered. And not to them. “I have no plan.”

  When we sat down to table, we were a threesome. My mother leaned back and drew the curtain. She had that. My uncle had his cough. I had my whisper. The room seemed large. I had shrunk to their size.

  Later that night, I climbed out of the window of my bedroom and walked the four miles to Charlotte, to the lodginghouse where Mr. Demuth had a room. Back there, I had left my door closed, my shade drawn, the study lamp burning—a composite of myself, of the half to be watched, while I trudged along the dark road, my own Doppelgänger, here. This was myself, I thought, this amalgam dark and solitary as the road I bore it along. I could not wait until morning to begin parting from that other.

  And that night, as I thought then, all conspired to help me do so. It was about ten o’clock when I knocked at the lodginghouse door and sent in my name. I had walked all the way without stopping, without pausing until then to think of what I would say to him. But when he hurried, glowing, into the shadowy hall where I stood shuffling my sneakers, I found that my presence was statement enough—he thought I had been sent him by my mother.

  “She acted quickly, eh, your mother?” he said, beaming. “Even though she does not like to hear you praised. And you walked all the way? But you are physically strong too, already bigger than me, and I am no shrimp, eh? One can make anything of a boy like you!”

  I drew back.

  “What was it you praised to her?” I said. “About me.”

  He waggled a finger at me and would not say. But I thought I knew. And I told myself, without knowing why, that I had come just in time.

  He took me to his room, that room where I was to spend so many gray, abstemious hours, and over the only refreshment he kept there—Seltzer water that he made in his own siphon, and the thin, bitter sheets of chocolate he carried with him on his intense, synoptic walks—he arranged for the afternoon and evening hours I was to come there, and for the extent of my training—which he was to be forever extending.

  It was a good room to strike a bargain in, bare except for those few, glaring comforts of the solitary, which he kept scrubbed to the quick and ranged two by two in the way one so often sees them in the rooms of the single, the basin by the ewer, the razor by the strop, the shoe by the shoe. Over the desk hung an honorable discharge and a state college diploma, both issued to Hans Ulrich Demuth. His part of our bargain was in the room too, although he did not show it to me then, nor did I trouble myself over what it might be. It lay behind his shaving mirror, shoved there, the one asymmetric fact that had no contrary, to which he could find no other side. The day before school ended, when I came to say good-by to him, he let me see it. Reaching over to his dresser for a final packet of the chocolate with which he had always crowned our best lessons, his hand touched that other, brought it out in the unaccidental way truth swims up at parting.

  When I saw it, I should have seen too why, of all the hundreds of facts that he had always passed on to me without preference, of all the arguments, hypotheses over whose pros and cons he always presided with the detachment of an umpire, he had given his partisanship to only one—Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics—which he sometimes had propounded to me with a queer, averted passion. I should have seen this as it lay there in his hand, simple as a gem—the way the core of a life always is. But that is what the past is for—it cuts the gem.

  “My son …” he said. And at first, squirming, I took the phrase for the ave that went with the chocolate. Then I saw what lay in his hand. It was a picture of a boy of about seven, gazing out at me with the non-face, the raceless all-face of the mongoloid, gazing beyond me with veiled, semifetal eyes.

  “My wife stays—to be near him,” he said. “She will not come to be with me. But someday yet she comes.”

  Then we parted quickly and as formally as usual, although because of what he happened to be holding, we did not shake hands.

  I never heard that she came. He rarely stayed long in one place and left Tuscana shortly thereafter, to be rumored of more and more faintly in towns farther and farther off, like some Johnny Appleseed of the schoolroom, until he echoed no more.

  But that first night, the bargain seemed all of my own making, and the clear air of that parallel room struck my nostrils with winter freshness. We would exchange nothing of ourselves, this man and I, I thought with satisfaction—only the knowledge that was in the syllabus open to all, and when we spoke and listened it would be in the Esperanto that saying all, says nothing.

  When I left, again he was full of admiration for my trek to him, my impetuous energy, and pressed upon me the first of the packets of chocolate. I refused it, but he insisted, and I slipped it in my pocket. As I walked home, I wanted nothing; the night seemed mine. It was even cold, the way the smudged nights here rarely were, as if the dark, heat-modulated valley had for one night pierced the skin of its own climate. I walked along head up, exhilarated, inhaling the strange, nude smell of winter, some of the North compelled already to me.

  But when I climbed into my room again, I could not bring that polar air in with me, although I held my chilled fingers to my cheeks and left the window wide. I turned out the lamp, and the sky leaped a pace inward but no farther. I leaned far out the window, and still breathed mixed air. Stepping back, I stood in the room’s center, feeling for my own. From all the corners of the sleeping house there came to me the stale smell of the status quo, that powerful exudate which, if it conspires, does so neither for us nor against. Lying down in my clothes, I fell asleep, blaming the house.

  Sometime during the middle of the night, rolling in my sleep, I felt the packet he had given me, hard against my hip. I rose up, still in my sleep, and flung it toward the window. It broke against the frame and fell inside, where I found the pieces the next morning.

  Later on, I would never eat any that he gave me, always managing to leave it somewhere or let it crumble to dust in my pockets. But compromise has no taste, no muscle; one day it is merely there, in the bogged ankle, the webbed tongue. That night I had taken my first step into its dim rationale. I had wanted no help from outside on anyone’s terms; I took it, on mine. One edge of myself was blunted, and by me. I had seen no way to avoid this. One rarely does. And it had come just in time. As it does.

  Chapter II. In Between Reflections.

  AFTER THAT, DURING THE year I remained in Tuscana, I no longer went to Miss Pridden’s. I was “placating providence” as we say—in reality punishing one side of myself for something done by the other. We learn very early that we have a right side and a left; one of my earliest memories—I could not have been more than three or four, for I could barely slide down from bed to floor—is of patting my left foot in consolation for having put the sock on the other one first, and of trying to remember each morning what yesterday’s alternation had been, in orde
r to change round and make amends to the neglected side. More often, I could never be sure, and was troubled by an unfairness, by a sense of having done wrong somewhere.

  I no longer have that minute obsession, nor, so far as I knew, any particular one of those that swarm so significantly in the medical books, yet sometimes, when I am dressing in the morning, I remember that early flinching. We nurse that duality all our lives, and although we may no longer minister to it in such childish forms, it is with it that all our self-punishment is involved. The attempt to equate it, to solve it, in terms gropingly sensual, naïve or grotesque, is of all pursuits the most human. And the most enduring—for the pursuer is pursued, for we stretch to close that duality with hands doomed to it.

  A gnomic statement! Where do they come from, these statements that crowd increasingly upon me, arriving like weather reports flagged from an unmapped country that has no season, or only one? It would be ironic if, trailing my hand in the stream of what I deem to be myself, I should bring up only what other men, in unison, have long since culled. But why else should I begin to make pronunciamentos in the name of “We,” who have kicked and fought all my life to remain “I”? I must beware of falling into that soft man-trap of the larger sympathies, wherein a man stumbling along after himself suddenly discovers elegiacally that he is only another member of the human condition—and then has all the human condition to consider.

  No, I must take into account that very quality of mine which I have too much admired—the vicious dexterity of a mind trained to receive everything, bent on remembering everything, in order to conceal from itself the one thing it does not want to know. These subfusc bits of some philosophy, ordered or scattered, that I did not even know I held, are at best only diversionary sops of light, algae floating in their own phosphorescence. I must remind myself again and again that the truth of a man, when once seen, is exceedingly simple, perhaps pathetically so, and is to be found not only in that underground of surrealist imagery, Argus-eyed self-refraction, which of late has so captivated the world, but above ground, in his simple story. It lies there—the simple gem. When I see it, its one virtue will be that I have done so. And perhaps that its face will not be the raceless all-face, but mine. Surely, even if I must learn to divest myself of other arrogances, that one I may keep?

  So, then, I must learn to watch even the monitor I hold so dear, who holds back the story even as it emerges—now in a man’s voice, now in a child’s. For reading back over what I have written, on this the tenth night since the one when I first sat down here, I see an extraordinary thing. And in it, I see how the critic voice, exquisite magister, always takes something away before it gives. I thought I had recorded everything, as I must do. Yet there is one omission. I have never put down my name. Not the one I have now, whose account I must shortly give. The one I gave up.

  It is an ordinary name. It would shake no worlds. If cried in the streets of London, it might wake a distant tambour in the ear of some householder who was once an urchin in Fulham, of certain servants retired to Putney or Streatham, or of two brothers and two sisters returned to spend Christmas with whatever old ones are still there in an old house. In Tuscana it would wake no one. Only the second name would sting an occasional ear, like a fly carried over from a summer more than twenty years before.

  When a man changes his name, even at the prompting of others, as was the case with me, there must be, I suppose, always some equivocation of identity, some counterpoint still vibrating in the brain. Yet I, when I took up the new name, turned my head to it at once. I filled its shape at once, like those children whom legend says the Tziganes used to transmogrify, fattening them inside squat ampullae, until, years later, when the mold was split, there stepped forward a vase-shaped man. I never turned my head to the old name again.

  This is a strange evening, still early dusk, one of those half-lit, weekend evenings when the man who has told everyone he will be away looks down onto the street, where a letter is being slipped into a pillar-box, hears a phone in an areaway honing on unanswered, unanswered, and wonders on the absurdity of his being alone. Over the East River the powerful shadow-growth begins, and the oozing timbre of the ships—gruff and choral, exchanging in German their doubled, Faustian pleas. They plead with the room—a roomful of bargains, like everyone’s—where all the fine lava-dust of books and prints will not conceal other objects set impenetrably two by two.

  Where so many bargains have been made, one may make one more. When the time comes, I will speak the old name. But not to a page. To someone. When I can do that, perhaps then shall I have come to the end of the story?

  A strange evening, moving with strange half-thoughts. One that I have never had before. What if I too must look, not in the great, deserted honeycomb of what I remember—of circumstances piling like feathers, blanched voices, people entombed like crusaders—but in what I have forgotten?

  Chapter III. My Mother and Miss Pridden.

  I WAS NOT LONG missed at the Pridden house. My mother took my place there. One day, shortly after I had told her I would be studying with Mr. Demuth, she posted a letter to Miss Pridden, telling me, without other comment, that she had done so. An answer, brought by a small colored boy, came the next afternoon.

  My mother saw him approach. “Who’s that coming up the walk?”

  “Miss Pridden’s boy.”

  “She does not use the post, then? Or she’s not on the phone?” Because of my mother’s customers, we had lately had a phone installed.

  “Yes, she has a phone.”

  My mother folded her sewing. Then, with a flick of her eyebrows, she rose and went to the sideboard, pausing there for a moment as if she recalled certain delicacies, old protocol stored there. She took out her purse.

  “Let me.” I stood up, stretching the height that still encumbered me. At the door, I fumbled in the tallied hoard in my pocket and gave the boy a quarter.

  My mother turned over the envelope, thick and faintly yellowed, with one large, tremulous word slanting it. “What did you give him?”

  “A quarter.”

  “A quarter? More than needful, wasn’t it?”

  I hesitated. “That’s—what she gives him.”

  “Oh? So?” She gave me a curious, assessing smile, but, contrary to our usual procedure with other outlays made from my small allowance, she did not offer to repay me. She was never stingy except from circumstance—even then sometimes breaking into an intense, short-lived largesse—but she knew, as I knew from her, that an action, when paid for in whatever coin, is then and then only one’s own. “And is she rich, then?”

  “No. Poor, I think.”

  “Oh. So,” she repeated. Bending over the envelope, she read out the word on it. “‘Addressed’” she said, in the ebbing tone of reminiscence. “I did not know they used that form here. ‘Addressed.’”

  Two days later, when I came back after school from Mr. Demuth’s, I found a note saying that she had gone to tea at the Pridden house. And laid out on her bed, with its skirt spread to its full circle over the edge of its box, I saw her wedding dress, never since worn. I saw too how plain it was against either the dresses in the new stores in Charlotte or those brilliant ones on which she herself sewed, differing from her own two or three others that all seemed one, only in its breadth and its blue. It was still plumped with tissue-paper stuffing; she had looked at it perhaps but not tried it on, and had gone out in her usual black habit.

  When she came back, she was flushed and bemused, but more daintily than when she came from the pub. She went past me without a word, into the bedroom, where I heard her humming, and the crackle of the paper as she put the dress away. During the next fortnight she said nothing about the visit, but after that, when it became a weekly venture, she let me understand, although she did not mention the scholarship, that my persistence with Mr. Demuth would be condoned in the light of that other patron who had been approved.

  She never dreamed that I felt she had supplanted me there. I hugge
d bitterly this second insight of how the grown could stride briskly into a room, a relationship, into which the half-grown had preciously crept. And being already half a man, I felt too what a man often feels when two women become friends because of him—that there is always some faint risibility against him in their alliance, exploding in shameful squibs of confidence over his head. I doubt whether this was so between my mother and Miss Pridden. It was only my jealousy focused on a facet of what is always so—that the friendship between women, of women, however loyal, is never wholly substantive; the purity that some of us can give to friendship they give only to love. My mother, of course, did not know what I was feeling—either when she passed me on her way there, carrying the benné seed cakes that she had made to Miss Pridden’s receipt, or some other small token—or on the evenings when, returned from there, she let fall in conversation some warm, descriptive token of the house. Several times she asked me to go with her, but I always pleaded my lessons with Demuth. Once I asked her, “Do you have tea in the library?” and her answer—“No, in the parlor”—gave me a certain painful comfort, but I never went.

  I assumed that the house was her real patron, as it had been mine. But my mother had been much shifted about in the world, and never seemed gnawed by that malady which attaches itself to places, whose victims carry its Aleppo boil forever in the palm. Her attachment went to people, back to a certain complex of them that she once had known, and in Miss Pridden, for the first and only time here, she had recognized that composition once more. The dressmaker is a confidante also, and not only of the secret paddings at the breast, the bandy legs beneath the ball dress. As the vanities and the social aspirations flutter down heedlessly on the head bent to the hem, it knows mercilessly as well what other rickety lacks may be borne to the ball. It humbles itself, in hair-true snobbery, only before that maigre straightness of bone which, ignorant of Mendel, it calls “style.” My mother had seen Miss Priddens before, in those shabby deaconesses of the genteel whose cheques came more promptly than those of the rich, who ordered a dress from her perhaps once every three years—limpid women, not overly bright or flaming with castellan ardor, who nevertheless inhabited a category for which there was no other word but the seditious one “aristocrat,” a water-color world that ought to have been dead, but in whose pale depths one glimpsed, as unmentionable by them as their underwear, furtive shadows of noblesse that glided like carp in an eighteenth-century pond.