False Entry (11 page)

As I had foreseen, Mr. Demuth, after our meeting at Miss Pridden’s, had come almost immediately to see my mother, to tell her what a duckling she owned. I was not present when he came; he may have planned it so, but I could well imagine that interview—his surprise when he learned that my mother knew nothing of Miss Pridden (either of what the town so indifferently knew of that eminent house or of my intimacy there), and his gleeful assurance—to what portentous tilting of chairs!—that this secrecy of mine signified all the more what a prize bird, what a downy bird the two of them had. Even more clearly, I could picture my mother, her deference to the schoolmaster while judgment waited on the rest of him, and then—posed with the keenness of my grandfather, of one herself reared to be the canniest critic of who her betters were—the
judgment
, sharp as one of her own needles, that this man, born here, was no surer of his place in this country than she was.

He was no guide for her, she must have thought, this man who teetered so uncertainly on his own nativity that he could keep himself comfortable only by patronizing her for the lack of it, whose hearty miracle tale, like a drummer extolling a cure-all, of how children here always
improved
on the status of their fathers, must have reminded her the more forcibly of the surer tone of that long-gone patronage which had stood upon what it was. And when he began to prate of my abilities, of my marvelously retentive memory, then she rose suddenly and dismissed him—“Your mother does not like to hear you praised,” he told me later—saying that she had to get tea ready for my uncle.

But when I came in, shortly after, nothing was readied. She stood at the window with her back to me and with the curtains wide, which was not her habit. The intrusion of the outdoors upon the in—a complexity that I loved even then—always made her uneasy; she would go out biddably enough to look at the moon when it rode beautiful and high, but always drew the curtains carefully upon it when she returned to the house.

“I did not ask him to stay for tea,” she said, still with her back to me. “He didn’t expect to find manners here. So I showed him none.”

“Who?” I said.

“Your schoolmaster.”

When she turned, her lips had the same set to them that she had awarded the history lessons. “You’ve no cause to worry. He didn’t see the snub.”

“They don’t have ‘tea’ here, but supper,” I said, aware she knew that as well as I.

“Ah, do they not!” One of her brown hair brooches fell to the floor. She bent to pick it up. “They drink tea on Pridden Street, I hear. He told me—how you play the gentleman there.”

“Eh?” she said, after a moment.

I said nothing.

“Why did you let me think the scholarship was all on your own?” she said, low. “What else do you keep to your … what do you talk of with the old woman there?”

“We don’t talk much. I go there for the books.”

“Ah no,” she said. “No. Else you would not have minded telling me.”

“What else could there be?” I muttered it. Mothers were sibyls. I feared a real answer. And craved it.

“I cannot say,” she said humbly. “I do not know.”

She came forward to me eagerly. “You don’t want the scholarship after all, eh? He begged me to make you let him help you; he said you would not. You were sharp there. He’s no sort for that.”

“I want the scholarship,” I said.

“And what will you do with it?”

I bent my head in silence, dropping down into myself, as others could sometimes all too keenly make me do. Down there were my hopes. I saw them—all retreats from what I did not want, not fine parades toward what I did.

She put her hands on my shoulders, looking up, now that I was taller than she. “Then why do you not stay here? The mill is losing men to the dam every day—all to the good for your uncle. They think well of him there. He will be head foreman next year … or the year after. You could rise there too.”

“It’s not
rising
I want!”

She shook me. “
What
, then?”

I closed my eyes. I wanted to get away from what I knew too well, to a place where no one knew me. Beyond that … I could not see.

“Open your eyes, do not do that—open them!”

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.

A
FTER 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 order 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?