False Entry (21 page)
And this was what I feared. The receiver slipped from my hand to the desk, hanging soundlessly on the thick manuscript pile. How had it come about; how had it ever come about? After the first compromise, I thought, all others follow. I learned to accept that long ago. No man, after a certain age, can fail either to know this or to marvel, like a man breathing under an avalanche, that under its numb, insidious powder-weight he is still—though not the same—alive. But how does it ever come about that the return of what his maturity mourned, his youth meant to keep so savagely pure, is the one further weight he cannot bear? That I tremble in fear of what, if ever it quickened again, harsh and lovely, up from the impossible dead, I meant to greet with joy?
From the desk, the phone spoke. A broad blue stained the room, assembled now in sanity, all its bargains plain. In spite of them, in the face of them, I picked up the phone. “I lied,” I said into it. “From the beginning. I lied.”
I waited for her answer, but none came. The return is not that verbal, that easy. And perhaps before I said it, I had made sure that she was gone.
For I know now what I fear. I fear that I may trust her.
O
N AN AFTERNOON, THEN,
late in the August of 1936, a young man and his mother could have been seen walking down the main street of a small town in Alabama, on their way to the courthouse for the granting of the petition that was to change his name. If you were a stranger in town and had idly chanced to ask who they were, either because, together in their dark clothes, they made such a clear print on the hazel afternoon, or because you, your informant and they were the only ones foolish enough to be out on the heat-stunned street at this hour, you would have been told that it was the wife of George Higby, the second foreman at Rhine’s, and her son. Rhine’s is the mill that you see for yourself, without being told, must once have drawn in every man around, but looks now like a collection of old cigar boxes at the base of a pyramid. The latter is one flank of the five-mile stretch you can see of the dams, about which you know a good deal, since this is probably the reason, via the overflow of the Denoyeville boardinghouses, that you are here at all.
It is possible that you will not even be told that the couple verging toward you are not natives of the region, for your informant, a courthouse loafer by the smell and the stubble of him, has a curious eclecticism toward out-of-the-country foreigners, for such an ill-educated man. In his long residence here, a matter of almost two hundred years now in one version of him or another, he has seen all kinds of trade and tackle—Dutchmen to Huguenots, odd Pole tailors, even a coastal seeping of Spanish—and except for an infrequent rabbling of zeal against the infidel, he has neglected all of them almost to the point of tolerance. He has little energy to spare against that kind of alien; he is a xenophobe of skin, of the special foreigners who for the last hundred years have been on his neck, outnumbering him, burrowing in his groin and making cheese of his brain, ready at any time, he is sure, to hang their bone-chant on him, doubtless stirring his soup at this moment with the white clavicles of girls. Therefore the Higbys, here only eight or nine years and a quiet sort who keep to themselves, are in a way his colleagues, though never his kin, even as you are, and he is pleased to join you both in the affable custom of the place, which is to retail, even to a stranger, the secondary gossip that will make him feel at home.
George Higby, he tells you, is expected to be chief foreman when old Blankenship steps down. The wife does high-class dressmaking on the side; the boy is hers. Neat-looking woman, he adds, as the two pass on the other side of the street, the woman plump and convex in dark blue, with her hair coifed tight over her ears, the son heads taller than she, man-size ankles jutting out of his serge “best,” walking beside her as young men do with their mothers at that age—hanging back, hands in his pockets, blond head cast down.
As they cross in front of you where you stand, in front of Semple’s store, your informer gives her a respectful nod, his eye straying to the pavement at the corner, where a sunken horse trough bears a whitewashed street name, for the exchange of cake plates is an
Almanach de Gotha
in the town, and he has remembered with whom she takes tea. Son’s a real scholar, they say; old Miss Pridden at the museum has got him a scholarship to New York. And here, if your accent is cooler and drier than his own, he will suddenly rein in. He has done all that politeness, to your sort, requires of him, and besides, he has noticed that Mrs. Higby and her son have not turned the corner to Pridden Street but have paused at the foot of the courthouse stairs.
“Ah-hah, New York,” he says with a spit to the side, and he waits, with a tucked-in grin, for you to declare yourself, your station, which he doubts you can do as well as he. He knows, the grin says, views supposedly held up there of certain matters down here, but excuse him if it just won’t hold water with him that under that skin you don’t secretly feel the same. In which case, his squint says, your case is pitiful, for he has seen before the unease of your sort when “they” step aside for you, or worse still, poke Uncle Tom fun at you in a way that under his hot eye and lazy nether lip they would never dare—except that they know it pleasures him to see what they think of you—a sort not born, as he is, to command. No fine talk, he knows, can give you what he has—the rested psyche of a man who from birth has had somebody handy to despise. At the moment, however, a little current of interest blows toward him from the courthouse, and he is reminded of a spectacle there that will engage him, though not, by any invitation of his, you. This is Tuscana’s business and hence his, down here where the pursuit of what happens to people is a serious and open entertainment. He ambles off to attend to it. As the proverb says, his glass is small but he drinks from his glass.
But if your accent is within even a few hundred miles of being as soft and spatulate as, his, then things are quite otherwise; the conversation begins and ends differently all the way around. Been boarding in Memphis, have you; by God, he’s known a thing or two about Memphis in his time. He sends you a look from beneath his lashes, and either from your response or from what he sees, the set of your haunches or the fleshy fold under your eyelids, he feels free to name a street that used to be wide open, a particular place, the damnedest, you’d never notice it in passing, back of a livery stable. You have been there too, and this does it—what closer fealty between strangers than the fact of having been to the same one of those? Used to be a Polish woman here, no longer; still, he’s able to give you a street and a number, even some encouraging gossip about Mrs. Emerson, with whom you currently board. And when the couple, mother and son, pass before you in their slow, dark swath along the street, he answers your idle question with information more intimately slanted. Boy looks as if he’d like to be anywhere but where he is, at his mother’s elbow; from Alabama to Timbuctoo a widow mama is the same. Saw him do right well, though, in the Kid Gloves match in the new Charlotte school gym last year. Stood up against Jack Lemon’s boy, who’s old enough to vote and had no call to be there at all.
When Mrs. Higby crosses he gives her the same modest greeting, but when she is out of hearing he adds that she was Higby’s dead wife’s sister, something in the Bible about that, he isn’t sure whether for or against. Anyway, there’s been no issue of either marriage, and poor Higby is going to do the next best thing, adopt the son. Expect that this, maybe, or something akin to it, is what they’re heading to the courthouse for now. He keeps an eye on them, but you, being your kind of stranger, might prove to be even better entertainment, and he is convinced of this when you offer him a cigar. Ever see any cockfights in Memphis? If you have a little time on your hands this evening, you might notice some activity not too far from where you’re standing, in fact in back of the store. Store is kept by E. V. Semple, a man prominent in several fields. You think you have heard of him, you can’t exactly say where. As your informant strikes his match, he momentarily holds one thumb against the other in a peculiar way, the bent knuckle of the right at the joint of the stiffly extended left, forming an angle that might be nothing—or a letter easy to read. He squints when your eyes meet his, as your thumbs do the same. It is when the two of you look elaborately away from each other, down the street, that the woman and her son again come to mind. The pair at the courthouse door seem to have been having one of the low, intense exchanges of persons who do not make scenes. Then the woman turns suddenly, her wide skirt belling with the force of it, and goes in. Whether the young man will follow seems to be in question. Then, as if he knew he would all the time, he goes in.
“Court in session this afternoon,” says your new companion. “Judge just back from Montgomery. Every time he’s fresh from there, it’s a rip-snorter. Say he goes down there to get himself an injection of the law.”
By instinct the two of you, hands at ease with cigars now, turn slowly and regard the courthouse. The street is as motionless as a strip of desert sand. Heat oscillating above it makes a pattern, light running up watered silk, that you have known since a child. It will be different inside there; the climate of law is always opposite. In the winter cold snaps it will be musty with steam and hard as snuff to breathe. It will be dark as an old bruise inside there now, if not cool. On the way your informant, known to you now by name as you are to him, tells you that no one minds if the judge hogs both sides of the law here, people are kind of proud of it; besides, he always gives you your money’s worth, always puts on a good show. Gossip was, when he first came here, before the speaker’s time, long before, that he never finished his law study in Louisiana, never finished it anywhere at all. But nobody bothers about that nor ever did, figuring a thing done often enough and common enough is surely legal. By now, if it wasn’t, half the leases and liens in the county wouldn’t hold, say nothing of the jails. You nod agreeably; down here people are comfortable about such things; to you nothing of this sort has to be explained.
As you enter you are both quiet before today’s matter of interest, the natural spectacle always provided a man who keeps himself healthy in mind. Up North they may believe what they like, but this is a country of humanists, where the deepest theater is what happens to people. You have been bred to it, as you have been bred—not as they have—to know that life cannot be passed without violence, without resignation, and that a man who has no time to watch has no time at all. Forward, in the mauve shadow of the rostrum, are the judge, the mother and the son. The day has provided. Slouch and take your ease.
There were two such men at the back of the courtroom that day.
And the gist of that day is that I let my mother come to it, to its rostrum, unaware that anything had changed. As I look back there, I know that I have never done any one thing more irreparable than what I did by doing that, nor any more natural. If by “natural” one means not merely that red sequence of tooth and claw which drops hunter on hawk, hawk on mole, but the feral, inner sequence of a man. That red sequence in which we are sent first against ourselves, then, as we grow cleverer at eluding, against others we can use in place of ourselves. And in the order of things, those we use are the nearest to hand.
As I walked home that night from Fourchette’s, what had happened there seemed to me already almost a fantasy, the enactment of a daydream I had never before so fully admitted I had. The next morning I tried to forget it, almost to persuade myself that it had never been. I could do neither. I was never able to deceive myself as openly as some. And memory, that was to keep me so faithful, was already beginning to take from me the strength that knows how to put what is done with aside. I was already of the persuasion, as I remain, that what we do is never really done with. I had yet to learn that with what I failed to do it would be the same.
And so the days, not many of them, in which I could have willed things otherwise went by—days of grace we like to fancy them, contra the facts that tell us that if the precious interim of our inaction could come again, it would come again in the same terms of ourselves—again the constricted lover would not will himself to kiss, again the man on the beach would move just too late to lift the lost face from the wave. Days during which, if I could have brought myself to tell my mother what I had done, much might have been different—and during which I vengefully did nothing.
I told myself that I was afraid to reveal what I had done to her hopes, to see her rage, that I had never yet seen. And this was true, and foresighted. I was afraid, and her rage, when it came, though not as I had envisioned it, was dreadful. I reasoned also that in the “due process” peculiar to the Fourchette office—even I could see that this was like a coil of rope payed out as needed, sometimes hawser-thick with ceremony, at others thin and neglected as old tatting thread—there was a good chance that the petition might not come to light again for months, by which time I would be far away. And this was reasonably true. But beneath all that I told myself was the deeper truth—that I longed to see the rage, to strike the blow. So I let myself swing in the lap of things-as-they-were, and “did”—as I persuaded myself—“nothing.” And I was not disappointed. No wonder we ultimately adore the
status quo
, hating the sense of it only in our tragic moments, or as good boys to the preceptors who tell us that it is too low a form of mental life for creatures risen to the distinction of a future and a past. For meanwhile it creeps for us, doing our good work and our dirty, giving us a pale respite in that Eden of the animals from which we are barred.
Once during those days a particular chance came; it had no number on it; it was not that illusory “second” one to which we limit ourselves; it was merely a particular one of the infinite train, offered us with the precision of minutes on a dial, whose progression, in order to live sanely, one ignores. On the Friday after the Monday on which Mr. Fourchette Senior had been due to return home, newly swollen with law and order, from Montgomery, I came home late in the evening after my weekly job of loading and unloading trucks at the market. Summer market days were thronged now, even in Tuscana, and went on until midnight. Our house had no hall, no hall table, but on my way through the kitchen I passed the shelf on which our scanty mail was always laid. A long envelope lay there, Fourchette stationery, addressed to my mother. It had been opened, I saw, and for a moment my breath bounded with relief—the secret was out; my need to decide, that I had pretended did not exist, was over. All sorts of hazards crossed my mind—that the petition, bearing one new name or the other, had somehow been granted
in absentia
, or else that Mr. Fourchette Senior was communicating with my mother, having discovered his son’s fraud. I unfolded the enclosure. It was not the petition but its forerunner, gazing up at me with the same neuter, conscious lack of blame with which the messenger gives the tidings that open the Greek play. It asked all please to take notice that such and such a petition would be presented on such and such a date—a week hence—at the opening of court on that day or as soon thereafter as counsel could be heard, that an application would then and there be made for an order of the court directing a change of name of said infant, pursuant to the civil rights law of the State of Alabama, and that said petitioner would then and there “apply for such other incidental relief as the court may deem just and proper.” Signed
Hannibal Fourchette
,
Attorney for the petitioner
, and dated the previous day. Although a projected name should probably have been incorporated in the notice, none appeared there; the form of Mr. Fourchette’s legal notices, like so much of his law, was his own.