False Entry (24 page)

At the thought my breath expelled, and fright with it, replaced by another, long with excitement, indrawn. This was the gamble. It had begun. But the most potent fact was that the gamble
was—
wherewithal of interest enough for the lifetime of any man. The owl tapped, objectivity revealing itself on my shoulder, alluding with its beak to all that one could watch, to the great spectacle—chance forever doubling on certainty—of all that was. In its release, I forgot my mother now, as later I would forget any person by my side.

For if before, on that day for instance when I left the envelope in Fourchette’s office, I had felt the swelling of appetites huge to know more, but indefinite, now I began to know what that “more” was. It included all the roaring diapason of sex, ego, ambition that went with my age, but it went beyond it, hovered above it. What I had, what I was beginning to discover, was an appetite for alternatives. I saw opening slowly before me a horizon of watching and experiment at all the shapes of life—life mutated by lie and direction, life when it was left alone—in all the combinations and permutations thereof, hand over hand over hand. And if this is what is called the sense of wonder, fiery and common to the mind of the young, then I had—and still have—my share.

Meanwhile, I peered hard at that blot of dark on the rostrum, the wig-smooth crown of Mr. Justice Fourchette, as a man might stare at a contender against whom he bets himself. I leaned forward so far, so unaware, that my mother, signaling decorum, touched my hand. It was then that the two men entered, on the balls of their feet, heads obeisant, the way people enter a ceremony they are no part of, tiptoed to the rear, and sat down. Mr. Fourchette raised his face again and looked at us, the case before him, and, with a trouper’s faint lift of the chin, at his audience—tardy, but arrived. One arm, short and matchstick in the sleeve of his gown, less imperial without its show of linen, beckoned to the doorkeeper. The latter, a tall emaciated man with great discs under his eyes and the kindly stoop of those whom a protracted inner disease allows to remain upright, left his post and came forward. Apparently he acted also as the clerk; in this court, perhaps more openly than in most, no one was himself alone. A rap of the gavel; then the judge put it sharply aside, brooding over it for a moment, seamed and sour, as if what should have been a rod of serpents that rolled away of itself was seen to be a nothing, a nondescript out of any kitchen drawer. But his face, when it looked up, was still charged with the greed that remembered the port-wine taste of the law in Montgomery, the eagerness that, at seventy, still dyed its hair for hope. His voice when it came was not leathern, without bellows, as it had been in his office, but easily heard in the farthest corner—a clear Southern reed, still golden, that he might have stolen, without the stammer, from his son—and staring out over the five of us as if we were a multitude, he said, “Next! Higby!”

We stood up, my mother and I. The old clerk, taking over what should have been his from the beginning, cleared his throat and informed us that we were convened in the matter of the application of Dora Cross Higby, petitioner, for leave to change the name of the said infant, myself. And at that moment, one half of our audience in the rear snickered. My back was turned to them; therefore I had no way of knowing whether or not it was the half from Tuscana, although I suspected it—the visiting stranger being more likely to have a guest’s humility—but I thought I knew why he laughed. I, the infant, was already six foot three at the time, all hocks and wrists, grown out of my clothes but not yet into bones that appeared formed of a long taffy that nature was still incredibly pulling. I seemed even taller than a man of the same height would, than I would myself ten years hence, and my mother, the crest of her head stretched to its highest, was more than a foot below the shoulder of her infant. The laugh was to me merely part of the daily silliness the young must accept politely from elders who “could not get over” what my bones each day literally taught me—that things changed. It did not occur to me that there might be a tickle of the sexual in the snicker, over the gross possibility that this great infant was a bastard brought in belatedly, come at last to be legalized. No doubt it had occurred to the judge, to any of the town who knew of it, and now to my mother, although she gave no sign, but it was not this public poke at it over which the judge now took umbrage, or seemed to. He was not defending my mother, whose three-minute bit of office trade he had seen fit to make a pother over; indeed, he seemed to have forgotten her, and kept her standing through all that ensued. It was his court, all courts and their language, that he now undertook to defend against this polyp of ridicule coughed up by the
hoi polloi.
Outrage, a pretense of it, puffed his sunk cheek, but he could scarcely repress the smirk of the man who has been proffered the excuse he has been looking for. One hand crept toward the gavel and rejected it, came down on the desk instead with a slap that must have reddened its palm.

“Order!” he said. “Some clarification seems needed. For the uninitiate.” He inclined his head, squinting toward the rear row of chairs. “In order that they may fully understand that nothing derogatory is here intended. That there is a fixed nomenclature by which an entity or entities—
vide
objects or persons—” here he bent his glance on my mother and me and we lowered ours under it—“by which an entity, its limitations and its essence, is defined in court. In accordance with which this young man, entering here for such special purpose as shall in due course be revealed—” here he paused, and we felt the notice of all, an extra heat on our bent necks—“is hereby designated ‘infant.’” This time no one snickered.

“A short exposition, then,” he said. “By your leave.” In the silence that overcomes a classroom of mocked children, the old clerk polished a pen with a saw-toothed cloth penwiper as big as a handkerchief, set both down, and with the tolerance of a saint for his ordeal, folded his hands. And we, standing like turkeys at market under the auctioneer’s impenetrable spiel, listened to Fourchette’s “clarification.” It came in that same voice, clean and mellow but circling and never centering, the words distinct of themselves but the meaning in almost unreportable periphrasis. Once there was an interval, restfully blunt, in which he listed, in the patient voice one uses to children, certain legal terms that did not mean what they meant to the laity—the “curtesy” that did not signify courtesy, the “escheat” that had no connection as we knew it with “cheat.” And once he said without preamble in a negligent, fatigued nasal that I knew, without ever having heard such before, must be perfection: “Montesquieu.
Esprit des Lois.
” Thereafter the outpouring continued so majestic in pace and confidence that minutes passed while the ear fuzzed, eyes squeezed closed in concentration, the head stretched from side to side, before the key came to me—as it does to the identity of a foreign language—in one surmise.

What I was hearing was the near-sense that was not nonsense but hovered, fearfully grandiloquent, between—the antic of a brain contorting against itself, toward others, in the spirals of its prides, its vanities, its need, and so cannily touching now and then at the sensible that only the spiral itself, encoiling the speaker ceaselessly in the one manifestation he could not control, had given me the key. I closed my ears to all but the sound of it. This was no more, surely, than—in the large, magnified to the third power so that the cracks in the reasoning showed—what all men did in their private moments at one time or another: the child singing his ego-song at stool, the young man orating his future at the mirror, old men of Fourchette’s age haranguing themselves. But the town, a public macrocosm, accepted it publicly. Therefore, if there was mania here, it was the town’s. I was too young to take this as usual or to understand, as I do now, that no man when he thinks with a group is wholly sane. As Johnny had once, I assumed that Tuscana must be different from other places elsewhere. Meanwhile I was here in its coil, tasting for the first time the knowledge that once one put one’s private affairs in the public domain, one was already in the prisoner’s dock. Fourchette’s voice returned to my ear in the dying fall of peroration, and I recognized a foreign language I knew.

“
Respiciendum
,” he said and cleared his throat. “On the functions of a judge: ‘
Respiciendum est judicanti ne quid aut durius aut remissus constituatur quam causa deposcit; nec enim aut severitas aut clementiae gloria affectanda est.
’” It was a different Latin from the classical pronunciation I had been taught—Italianate, Jesuit perhaps, with the soft
ch
of its
respiciendum
, its hard
j
and
v.
He was translating: “The judge must see that no order be made or judgment given or sentence passed either more harshly or more mildly than sentence requires; he must not seek renown as a severe or tenderhearted judge.”

Residual guilt rushed to my head like blood; I thought myself indicated already for intent, already called to account for what had not yet occurred. Then I recognized the tone, falsely humble, that ministers use when, referring to themselves as the instruments of God, they wish nevertheless to call some slight attention—“
Ecce homo
”
—
to themselves. “Therefore, for the judge of true vocation,” he said, “no matter is too small. And for the true court.”

Upon this, the clerk, as if he knew this place in the service, took up his pen. At my side my mother swayed, but would not sit down, and instead gripped my arm. The judge looked vaguely on us, catching movement, but it was plain that he did not see us except as those entities which he had been defining. We were, I thought, like those “clots in consciousness” spoken of in the mechanistic philosophers Demuth had once set me to reading, and the consciousness was Fourchette’s; until he snapped the tension we could not move.

“In accordance with which,” said Fourchette, “in the matter before us, we shall see what is set down here in the matter of names.” Drawing closer to him a loaf-shaped book concealed until now by the black folds of his sleeves, he began puttering at its pages. “
Nomen collectivum … generate …
” he muttered to himself, and for what seemed minutes, fell still. Silence covered us, the long, shared public silence, a canopy upheld by participants who dare not, until the signal, lower their arms.

“Ah,” said Fourchette. He pushed the book from him and at the same time snapped on the light in the lectern. In its arc the eye of the clerk blinked, patient and uncynical, the farthest figure in a holy picture, but still drawn in along the master painter’s invisible radial line.

“Names are mutable; things immovable,” said Fourchette. He poked a finger over the rostrum, not at my mother and me but at his audience, those two in the rear whose faces I should have liked to turn to see—chapfallen and won, were they, or like touts watching the barker, or—heads back—catching flies?

“
Nomen mutabilia sunt
,” he said, enunciating the text for them in the delicate accent slipped down to him from no dame’s school, from sugar-tongued grandfather, father or uncle gracefully tagging the postprandial brandy, or from the tutorial knuckle-lash of priests, “
res autem immobilis.
” He fell silent again before he gave out the reference, head drooping, eyes veiled. In the mauve light the eyeballs showed almost spherical in their sunken hollows, the long cheeks august in their furrowed decline; for a moment one saw the whole, fine heirloom skull under the Mardi Gras wig of hair. Then he raised his head, and I saw the quizzical seam of the mouth, the eyeballs—looking at me and beyond me—of a soul that in the midst of its own
blagues
remained undeceived, an immovable pinpoint within the spiral, and I was filled again with bewilderment and wonder at all the permutations of the world. Waving an arm at the clerk, he gave out the reference. “Six, Coke, sixty-six.”

And at once the clerk fell to, like a suddenly whirring clock. The pen, poised in abeyance, dropped like a pendulum to follow lines whose bluish purple I recognized, to trace his place down each page of a sheaf of papers—one, two, three—that he held up now to the arc light and gabbled from in a rote voice that ran on indistinguishably over syllables, a merged prayer heard from a stall, in which he raced his breath, his disease perhaps, flinging out to us now and then the clear pebble of a phrase, not that we might know where we were, but that we might know his speed. And as he gabbled, traveled, flew, the room relaxed to his voice as if it were a breeze; in the background the two spectators stirred, scuffing knee over knee, and one of them—which?—cleared his throat; Fourchette touched a handkerchief to his forehead, then sank his chin in its folds in the attitude some assume when they listen to music; up at the high window the leaves spangled, tossing lightly. Outside a shutter banged, then another, then no more. And still the clerk raced on. Only I felt nothing but the hot pulse of my own breath as it listened, and the weight of my mother, still upright in the proud torture-case of her own will, but hanging heavier, heavier on my arm.

“In the Matter of …” said the clerk, beginning. “I … hereby state … am the son of petitioner herein … reside with her at … I was born in … on … emigrated with mother to … on … have duly registered … Alien Registration Act … received number….” I have a number, I thought; he said it too quickly; where did they get it?—I never knew.

“I have read the annexed petition,” said the clerk, “know the contents thereof … do hereby consent to granting of the relief prayed … signed … dated … Tuscana … 1936….” He must stop for a breath, I thought, but he was too quick for me.

“On the day of … appeared before me … known to me to be the person described … executed the foregoing … duly acknowledged … that he executed same … signed … Notary Public.” The notary was the druggist; I had never gone before him to execute such a form; it must have been drawn up without me. And here the clerk rested. In the lull we could hear a swishing of the upper air, no spatter in the streets. At the high window the tree, moving sidewise in steady motion, and seen now to be a single branch plumed upward and bent at the crown, nodded in on us, a portion of the natural world nosing in at the human. My mother shifted her weight on my arm. The clerk turned his page. And this ended the first paper.